The Artist as Reporter - Radical Print

 

The Artist as Reporter – radical printmaking

One of the motives behind using print as the medium for exploring Gaskell’s work is the radical history behind printing presses and the mass produced print culture of the 19^th century.

Paul Hogarth, The Artist as Reporter, (London: Studio Vista, 1967)

‘From the earliest periods of recorded history, artists were reporting prowess, pageantry and discovery… One early example is a Chinese painted hand-scroll of the Sung Dynasty commissioned by a wary emperor to record the nocturnal habits of a rival nobleman. The art of the hand-scroll… is an interesting forerunner of the illustrated periodical.’ P.7

‘Woodcutting made this artist’s view of his fellow-men more widely accessible.’ – using print to explore a historical and literary work makes it more accessible to understand.

Chapter 2 The Coming of the Illustrated Newspaper

‘Periodicals in one form or another had been a feature of civilised life since the days of the Roman Empire. News sung or recited by wandering ballad singers in the village taverns and ducal courtyards of Germany and Italy; the hand-written newsletters supplied to merchants and bankers in Amsterdam and London – these were the predecessors of the great illustrated weeklies of the Victorian Age, and the glossies of our own time.’ P.12

‘The role of the artist in the printed periodical only began to take shape in the 1840s, when the new illustrated press of the rising middle classes was establishing itself. These new picture papers were to become the most influential of visual communication of their time.’ P.12

‘In England, the industrial revolution created not only a railway network but a large reading class of shopkeepers, clerks, merchants and industrialists, obsessed with the ideas of progress and self-improvement.’

Initiated by the encyclopaedists of the French Revolution.

‘Into every middle-class home went penny encyclopaedias and penny magazines, crammed with articles on social and political reform, life in other lands, technological and scientific progress…. To link intellectual enlightenment with entertainment had also been the idea behind similar publications in France, Germany and the United States… By the end of 1842, the circulation of the Illustrated London News alone had reached 60,000 copies.’ P.15

‘Although it was obvious that the largely middle-class reading public had left the penny dreadfuls to the poor, and was ready for the illustrated newspaper…’ p. 16

Chapter 3 Scenes from Everyday Life

‘genre, scenes de moeurs or social satire, this more creative side of the documentary tradition is essentially an art based on an artist’s intimate and first-hand knowledge of what he has to say, and saying it the way he thinks best. It is an art which goes back to the springs of popular folk-art of the middle ages. This was a graphic art immensely rich in style, with a strong national flavour.’ P.17

‘Especially popular were those devoted to the ups and downs of rural life. And as the long suffering peasantry were always at the receiving end of what was done in the name of history, satires which poked fun at authority or unpopular personages were also favourites.’ P.17

Chapter 6 The Critics of Victorian Society

‘The dramatic contrasts and glaring inequalities enforced by expanding industrialisation provided rich material… With mixed reactions artists gazed at a city famous for its depravity as for the lusty vitality of its popular life. Dore, Cruikshank.

Graphic journal founded by William Luson Thomas , Illustration he felt ‘should be enjoyed for its truth and closeness to life. Very much the hard headed Liberal man of action, Thomas believed that propaganda against crime and poverty could be effectively combined with entertainment for a wide public.’ P.33

‘The popularity of the Graphic illustrations was immediate. The new paper soon became the rival of the Illustrated London News. Their popularity was very largely due to those pages contributed by Luke Fildes, Herkomer, Holl, and Pinwell. The encounters of these artists with the misery, humiliation and crime of a big city were often weakened with pathos and sentimentality, but they were so full of sympathetically observed realistic detail that readers found them irresistible.’ P.34

The Graphic, January - June, Vol. 75 1907, archive.org, accessed 15 August 2022.