Art and Work: A Social History of Labour in the Canadian Graphic Arts Industry to the 1940s 9780773565241

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
1 Introduction: Social History and the Graphic Arts Industry
2 The English Inheritance: Artists, Engravers, and the Separation of the Arts
3 Transferring the Traditions: Visitors and Immigrants
4 Changing Patterns of Work: Engravers and Photo-engravers, 1870–1914
5 Changing Perceptions of Art: Artists and Commercial Artists, 1870–1914
6 Business and Art in Western Canada: The Spread of Commercial Ideas
7 Factors for Change: Labour and Art, 1914–1940
8 Conclusion: Social History and Popular Culture
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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K
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Citation preview

Art and Work A Social History of Labour in the Canadian Graphic Arts Industry to the 1940S

This book is a history of the development of commercial illustration and the graphic arts industry in Canada from the late eighteenth century to the 1940S. It suggests that the foundations of Canadian art and a Canadian popular culture rest not only within the European traditions of fine art but also with the work of those artists who practised in the commercial environment of the early graphic arts houses. It is also a history of a type of "work" that was new during this period. The mechanized reproduction of art works in the nineteenth century meant that artists found themselves within an industrial atmosphere similar to that of other workers. This history traces the beginning of that process in England, follows its transference to Canada, and demonstrates how illustrators, engravers, photo-engravers, and lithographers became part of an increasingly commercially oriented industry. It was an industry of major importance in the fields of printing and new forms of advertising, but it was also an industry that led to a change in status for the members of its workforce who considered themselves to be artists. The study is not concerned with aesthetic values of works of art or with the impact that commercially produced art work has had on consumer culture. Rather, it seeks to understand artists as workers, and work itself, within the changing commercial and industrial milieu of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Canada. A N G E L A D A V I S was an assistant professor in the Department of History at St John's College, University of Manitoba

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Art and Work A Social History of Labour in the Canadian Graphic Arts Industry to the 1940S ANGELA E. DAVIS

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

© McGill-Qucen's University Press 1995 I S B N 0-7735-1 280-2

Legal deposit first quarter 1995 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in the United States on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from St John's College, University of Manitoba. McGill-Queen's University Press is grateful to the Canada Council for support of its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Davis, Angela E., 1926-1994 Art and work: a social history of labour in the Canadian graphic arts industry to the 1940S I S B N 0-7735-1280-2 I. Graphic arts - Canada - History, I. Title. NC998.6.C3D39 1995 741-6 C94-900721-8

Typeset in Sabon 1 1 / 1 3 by Caractera production graphique, Quebec City

Contents

Acknowledgments Illustrations

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ix

1 Introduction: Social History and the Graphic Arts Industry 3 2 The English Inheritance: Artists, Engravers, and the Separation of the Arts 13 3 Transferring the Traditions: Visitors and Immigrants 3 6 4 Changing Patterns of Work: Engravers and Photo-engravers, 1870-1914 55 5 Changing Perceptions of Art: Artists and Commercial Artists, 1870-1914 83 6 Business and Art in Western Canada: The Spread of Commercial Ideas 100 7 Factors for Change: Labour and Art, 1914-1940 122 8 Conclusion: Social History and Popular Culture Notes

145

Bibliography Index

181

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Acknowledgments

While preparing this study of commercial art and illustration, I have been assisted and supported by many people who work in the field. I wish to thank those who talked to me about their experiences in the commercial art world, including artists and workers such as Kevin Best, Hunter Bishop, Frank Ferguson, Dorothy Garbutt, Kenneth Martin, Vi Munro, T.F. Nicholson, John Phillips, Agnes Riehl, Jean Vale, Sid Vale, and William Winter, who provided me with a wealth of valuable information. I am also grateful to Walter Lypko, John Mingay, P.M. Rolph, and Richard Stovel for talking to me about the graphic arts industry from both the business and the artistic points of view. On an academic level, I wish to thank Professors Jack Bumsted, Ruben Bellan, Douglas Cole, Peter Bailey and John Kendle for their interest in my work. Research in this project was made possible through a 198991 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellowship. The grant of membership in St John's College, University of Manitoba, provided me with a congenial academic home. In particular, I wish to thank the college warden, Murdith McLean, and the college librarians, Pat Wright and Carol Goodlow. I also wish to thank college members Debra Lindsay, Kathryn Young, and Mary Kinnear for their support,

viii Acknowledgments

and the faculty secretary, Lynn Kopeschny, for her expert assistance in computerizing the final writing of Art and Work. The illustrations were researched by Erica Smith, whose generous assistance is gratefully acknowledged. Assistance was also received from Christine Mosser, Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, and from the Western Producer, Saskatoon, the Museums Association of Saskatchewan, and the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Regina. Thanks are also extended to Renee Fossett Jones for her excellent work in preparing the index and to Carlotta Lemieux for her fine editing of the book. Finally, I wish to record a sincere debt of gratitude to Professor Gerald Friesen. His understanding of the relationship between labour and art, and of the value of approaching this subject as work, business, and technological history, has been invaluable. It was his encouragement that shaped my doctoral dissertation on the Brigden firm and sustained this extension of the project to encompass both Canadian advertising and artistic production.

Above, right: Sir George Back, Bloody Fall, 1821. Black-and-white engraving by E. Finden. Published in John Franklin's Narrative of a Journey to the ... Polar Sea ... 1819, 20, 21, and 22, London, 1823. (National Archives of Canada, C-102852) Engraved reproductions in the form of single-sheet prints were used to illustrate the popular literary genre of travel narratives. Back's eye-witnesses sketches of the Franklin polar expeditions were particularly prized for their supposed veracity. Bottom, right: William Henry Bartlett, The Rapids above the Falls of Niagara, 1837. Black-and-white engraving. Engraved by R. Brandard and published by George Virtue, 1837. (National Archives of Canada, 046682) Engravings of this period provided a direct link between English artistic tradition and Canada. The English engraver R. Brandard had been trained by Turner in the Picturesque manner, a style that was to dominate Canadian art throughout the nineteenth century.

Above: William Wallace, The Quebec Driving Club Meeting at the Place d'Armes ... Quebec, 1826. Etching and aquatint. Engraved by J. Smillie, Jr. (National Archives of Canada, 012.9830) James Smillie's fortunes as an engraver in Canada were closely tied to those of the military officers, who were often the only artists in the colonies at this time. Smillie made but a meagre living reproducing their water-colours and sketches. Above, right: Samuel Oliver Tazewell, "Side Sectional View of the Truss Bridge over the Chaudiere Falls, Ottawa River." Frontispiece in Notices of the Rideau Canal, Kingston, 1832,. (National Archives of Canada, C-84961) One of the first lithographs in Canada, printed on the pioneer lithographic press that Tazewell established in Kingston in 1831. Tazewell saw a future for lithographic printing - a new reproductive process - in Upper Canada. Below, right: Robert Auchmaty Sproule, Notre Dame Street, Montreal, 1830. Chromo-lithograph. Engraved by William L. Leney and published by A. Bourne, Montreal, 1871. (National Archives of Canada, €-100569) The collaboration between artists, engravers, lithographers, and printers was necessary to satisfy the public's taste for single-sheet commercial prints of city views and landscapes. The prints were reissued in 1871 by popular demand.

Lord Sydenham. Engraved by Hoppner Meyer, 1842, "from a portrait painted in London." (National Archives of Canada, €-178) Canadian publishers and printers of the 18405 were sceptical about the skills of resident engravers, whom they regarded as decidedly inferior to British and American artists. Hugh Scobie, publisher of the British Colonist, commissioned this portrait to demonstrate the sophistication and talent of local artists and engravers.

John Arthur Fraser, Son of Sir Louis H. Lafontaine, 1867. Photographed by William Notman and painted by John Arthur Fraser. (National Archives of Canada, €-24422) Photographic portraits combined photography and art. The technique involved the application of delicate gradations of colour directly onto photographs, thus satisfying both the artist's integrity and the public's demand for verisimilitude.

The Toronto Engraving Company, Bay and King Street, Toronto, in 1889. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library) The engraving firm owned by Frederick Brigden featured a modernized workplace, including the latest marvel in print technology - the ruling machine - which enabled the artist to rule straight lines in woodcuts.

Brigden's Limited, 19x5. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, 7-10177) Interior of the Richmond Street premises, Toronto, showing Charles Comfort (at left, wearing eyeshade), Tom Mitchell (at back right), and R. York Wilson.

Toronto Summer Carnival, 1890. Broadside; letterpress. (Courtesy of Metropolitan Toronto Library Board. Photo: Thomas Moore, Toronto) The black-ink broadside was typical of nineteenth-century "poster" advertising before Andrew King revolutionized the business. It featured a preponderance of text with diminutive wood engravings bought from a generic catalogue, since trained artists producing original art could rarely be found outside large urban centres.

Toronto Saturday Night. Cover of Christmas 1895 issue. Engraved by Frederick Brigden. (Saturday Night, courtesy of Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library) The explosion, in late-nineteenth-century Canada, of journals designed for popular consumption offered employment opportunities for engravers and artists, who were increasingly threatened by mechanization.

Canadian Illustrated News. Page i of the premier issue, 30 October 1869. Published by George-Edouard Desbarats, printer, and William Leggo, engraver. (National Archives of Canada, €-48503) The publication of this journal marked the first appearance in Canada of the revolutionary new technique of photo-engraving - a mechanical process that eliminated the need for hand engraving and illustration. This new technology revolutionized the graphic arts industry in Canada.

Above: World's Finest Shows, 1939. (Collection of Conklin Shows, Toronto) A typical "King Show Print" featured a trained tiger or lion jumping through a hoop - a simple but powerful image that captures the essence of the circus. It was also a favourite motif of Herb Ashley, an Alberta-based artist with whom King collaborated in the 19305. Left: Charles William Jefferys, "The Prairies." Lithograph. Opposite "February" in Calendar for 1904, produced by the Toronto Art Students' League. (National Archives of Canada, 012.4773) Toronto Art Students' League. "Frontispiece." Lithograph by Robert Holmes and C.W. Jefferys, 1898, in Calendar for 1899. (National Archives of Canada, €-124755) The Toronto Art Students' League, founded in 1886, was home to a diverse group of "fine" and "commercial" artists. Jefferys's work for the league's annual calendars resisted such categorization.

H. Eric Bergman, Wild Clematis, 1950. Wood engraving. (National Archives of Canada, c-iozf 866 ) By the 19505, the professionalization of graphic art contributed to its enhanced status as "fine" art, a development reflected in the work of Bergman. The products of graphic art - wood engraving and other printing processes - are now considered art forms.

Art and Work

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i Introduction Social History and the Graphic Arts Industry

This study is not a traditional history of art. Rather, it is a social history of the establishment of the graphic arts as a commercial industry in Canada. It considers the work and experiences of those involved in the creation and reproduction of art, the commercial processes and technical changes that affected them, and the businesses they founded or by which they were employed. Commercial art, also known as illustration or graphic art, is that branch of the arts which is reproduced, printed, published, and circulated to a mass audience. It is all around us - in advertisements, in travel guides and articles, in depictions of the historical past, and in books and magazines as pictorial images accompanying the written word. In studies of the natural world (for example, in books for ornithologists), drawn or painted illustrations are often considered preferable to photographs, and the same is true of medical and anatomical textbooks. In law courts, where television crews and photographers are sometimes denied access to certain trials and investigations, the illustrator, with his or her drawing and colouring skills, is relied upon to present the visual report of the proceedings. Illustration is so much a part of contemporary life that we take it for granted. Along with photography, it is an accepted and essential ingredient of modern mass communication. Yet in nineteenth-century Canada, the appearance of reproduced

4 Art and Work

images in newspapers, magazines, and books was a new and exciting phenomenon. The printing of visual images in Europe dates from 1471, when the first illustrated book was produced in Augsburg by Gunther Zainer. Its history in northern North America began in the eighteenth century, when visiting artists produced steel and copperplate etchings and engravings for British and American markets. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the mechanization of printing, the development of retail advertising, and the commercialization of illustration came together to create reproduced images for a new mass audience. Canadian popular illustration can thus be divided into two historical periods. The first consists of the years when a number of artists, etchers, and engravers recorded their observations for travel books and albums of landscapes and when a few printers and engravers in British North America tried to make a living supplying maps, charts, and landscapes for private individuals and government administrators. The second period began in the 18705, when individual illustrators, engravers, and lithographers established workshops and graphic arts houses in major cities. They were joined by printers, photographers, and photoengravers, and together formed a new industry - that of the graphic arts. Today, the Canadian graphic arts industry includes within its terms of reference printing, typesetting, stereotyping, lithography, photo-engraving, and bookbinding. Its workers include graphic designers, photographers, printers, and computer technicians. The various unions connected with the industry since the nineteenth century are now amalgamated into the single Graphic Communications International Union. The concept of a unified and all-inclusive industry is, however, of comparatively recent origin. Indeed, well into the twentieth century there was a separation between those working with the written word and those dealing with illustrative material. Thus, in the later nineteenth century, printing, engraving, and lithography workshops, or "houses," were, more often than not, separate establishments. The unions were divided into photo-engravers, lithographers, bookbinders, printers, and stereotypers, and until the 19405 the artists who worked for graphic arts firms were not considered to need a specialized training.

5

Introduction

When visual images were introduced into popular magazines in England in the 18405, the engravers and illustrators who produced them thought of themselves as artists or superior craftsmen - "art-workmen" was a favourite term used. Not until the speeded-up conditions of industrialized printing forced increased employment of large numbers of "commercial" engravers was a division created between independent artistcraftsmen and those working as labourers or employees. The present survey does not attempt to provide aesthetic judgments on individuals or their work, or to make a critical comparison of "commercial" and "fine" art production. Rather, it accepts the suggestion made by Albert Dome in relation to American illustration, that one can differentiate only between good and bad workers in any field - which leads to the inference that those who were historically influential and successful in their work were among its best practitioners. In other words, the focus of this study remains work itself and the changing perceptions of task, craft, and art in relation to work. In Canada as in England, the development of the graphic arts as an industry contributed to the growth of the separation of the arts into "fine" and "commercial," and the concept of culture into "high" and "popular." As artists were increasingly employed as illustrators, engravers, and lithographers for the popular press, their status changed to one of perceived inferiority. Illustration itself was frequently dismissed as not being an art form. Albert Dome notes that the word "mere" is often coupled with "illustration" and that because illustration is normally commissioned, it has been viewed as "impure" and "commercial," in contrast to "fine" art, in which artists are free to express their "innermost feelings."1 Part of the history of popular illustration concerns this division and the difficulties it created for artists who worked in both fields. It is a story of "class" judgments and includes the attempts of critics such as John Ruskin - whose ideas were as popular in nineteenthcentury Canada and America as they were in England - to stem the tide of upper-class opinion. The term "graphic arts," whether defined as an industry, an art, or a craft, has traditionally referred not to the reproduction of the written word but to the creation and transference of visual images from one medium to another. Advanced systems

6 Art and Work of printing were necessary for the introduction of illustration into books and magazines, as were media that would allow for clear reproduction.2 Steel and copperplate engraving and etching were most frequently used in the eighteenth century; and in the early years of the nineteenth century, lithography was popular for coloured images of scenery. Beginning in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, wood engraving became the most common process for reproducing images for mass publication. Later, lithography was increasingly used for posters and advertisements. By the i88os, as the result of the development of photography, photo-engraving threatened to undermine the place of wood engraving. This did not take place immediately, however, but led instead to a mixture of traditional wood engraving, the engraving of photographs printed on woodblocks, and the new photo-engraving, which was printed on copper plates. Until the expansion of the media of mass communication following the Second World War, the firms that made up the Canadian graphic arts industry were comparatively modest. Most of them started as craftsmen-owned concerns and were family operated and inherited. Later, in response to external economic or technological factors, they changed into managerial organizations, with branches in other cities. They did not, however, become vast corporate empires with political clout at a national level, though some eventually grew as they merged with other companies. While they were on a different level of economic organization from the railway, steamship, and lumber companies that are so popular with business historians, their involvement in, and reaction to, industrialization was similar to that of the larger institutions. The artist-craftsmen-engravers who established the first graphic arts firms found that in order to prosper, they had to keep up with new technology and with new demands on their skills. They invested in larger premises, introduced mechanized equipment as it became available, and began to employ workers other than their own family members. As with the printing industry, they did not suffer unduly during periods of general economic difficulty,3 and in response to the demand for advertising material, they were able to profit from the expansion of the retail trade in the i88os. With industrialization, graphic arts

7

Introduction

employees found themselves increasingly forced to specialize, a factor that led to divisions between artists and craftsmen in the first place, and between artists and "commercial" artists later. Employees who traded their craft for mechanization were further divided into the various trades introduced by the invention of photo-engraving. This latter aspect of the division of labour led to the formation of the Canadian locals of the International Photo-Engravers Union in 1904 and to the subsequent problems vis-a-vis management and labour which have played so prominent a part in the history of industrialization. In short, there were factors present in the industrializing process of the graphic arts that were common to all industries. The unique features of the graphic arts industry rested in its connection with art and in its active participation in the creation of methods of modern mass communication. Consideration of art and its relations with commerce and labour suggests an alternative approach to the historical study of Canadian artists. Canadian art history has followed the traditional pattern of concentrating on individual artists, evaluating changes in style, making aesthetic judgments, and treating works of art as autonomous objects.4 It has also joined in the habit of studying the past in terms of the present, tingeing it "with a Whig interpretation," as Douglas Cole has written.5 Some historians have gone so far as to suggest that much art history is not history at all but art appreciation. It is a history that has "mystified" its subject matter, failing to put it in its historical context or to relate it to the social situation within which it was created.6 Much of the critique of the traditional forms of art history has emerged from the feminist search for the reasons behind the neglect of women artists in art historiography.7 It is also possible, however, to criticize the traditional view from the perspective of those interpreting art within the areas of culture and cultural history. As Raymond Williams has pointed out, concepts of "culture" have repeatedly changed. Whereas, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, culture was considered to be "a general state of intellectual development," the term was gradually widened to mean "the general state of intellectual development in society as a whole," and it eventually came to be defined both as "the general body of the arts" and as "a whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual."8 Because

8 Art and Work

culture includes "art" as well as the external social processes that affect the production of art and the artists themselves, it is the latter interpretation that is relevant to any discussion of culture today. By extension, it also allows for the inclusion of "popular" culture. During the period of industrialization, the intellectual leaders' assessments of the place of art in society changed substantially. From a concern with an "independent value of art," containing within it a qualitative element understood by the community, the emphasis moved to one of "art for art's sake" or "art as a value in itself." Not surprisingly, this shift often led to a separation of art from "common life." On the other hand, since the time of John Ruskin in the 18405 and of William Morris in the 18705 and i88os, there has been a parallel move "towards the reintegration of art with the common life of society,"9 a process centred increasingly around the concept of "mass communication." The conflicts between the perception of "art for art's sake" and art as part of everyday life have stimulated the contemporary critique of the traditional methods of art history. On the one hand, art has been approached as part of an elitist study of "fine" or "high" art; on the other, "commercial" art and the development of "popular" culture have been treated as unacceptable in the art world. Consequently, art historians have generally neglected the role of the artists who were commercially employed and have denigrated work produced during periods of commercial employment. Moreover, by concentrating on culture as "the general body of the arts," they have ignored the concept of art as part of a culture that is "a whole way of life." As Alan Gowans argues in his study of the "traditional functions of art in society," the question "What is Art?" should not be answered in terms of aesthetics but in terms of "what it does."10 The history of the graphic arts is not, therefore, being defined here as the cultural study of high art. Rather, it will be interpreted in terms of the social context of a commercially produced art and the relevance of that art to the concept of popular culture. Essential to the creation of a popular culture were the invention and acceptance of commercial printing, advertising, and visual reproduction.11 To date, most studies of the new mass communication that began to appear in the nineteenth century have been concerned with the influence of its content: its power

9

Introduction

to persuade and manipulate within the context of class struggle and middle-class hegemony.12 What has not so often been explored is the development of the media industry itself. In view of the fact that there is an obvious relationship between the time period within which an industry functions and the type of product it produces, the history of the graphic arts industry can provide important insights into modern cultural experience. To a public that was becoming aware of a new type of communication, the graphic arts industry offered an art product that was different from the paintings and sculptures that fitted within an elite or intellectual concept of art as "a value in itself." Instead, the new commercial art products were understood and appreciated by a far wider audience, and they thus presented an opportunity for the "reintegration of art within the common life of society."13 Ever since Ruskin and Morris pointed out the difficulties that would emerge if art became separated too far from ordinary concerns, historians and others interested in the problem have been at pains to find ways of reuniting art and society. They have deplored the implication that the common run of people appear to have no understanding or appreciation of "art" as such, and they equally deplore a situation that promotes an art for an elite only.14 At the same time, they question the fact that an art created for mass consumption, for advertising, decoration, or other illustrative and commercial purpose, is denied the definition of "art." The mere labelling of such work as "applied," "decorative," or "commercial" immediately establishes it as inferior.15 The fact that it has been commissioned, produced, and paid for, demotes it as "art" in the opinion of those responsible for mystifying art. It also means that, as part of popular culture, it has been excluded from traditional art history. If, on the other hand, the position is taken that all creativity can be classified as "art," it can be inferred that differences in styles and forms of art relate solely to purpose and not to aesthetic value. For instance, experimental avant-garde paintings that are understood by a limited few, and mass-produced posters that are enjoyed by many, can both be included within the concept of "art." They can be judged "good" or "bad" within their own areas of specialty, but it need not be implied that the commercially produced poster is automatically inferior. As

io Art and Work

Thomas Munro has remarked, there is no rule that says "a product must be actually beautiful or otherwise meritorious in order to be classified as 'art.'"16 Art is thus a product the same as any other, and its form is determined by the social environment within which it is produced. The graphic arts industry and its historical development provide excellent vantage points from which to consider the production of art in this wider context. Mechanization and commercialization in the nineteenth century succeeded in allowing reproduced images to reach a public that had previously been only minimally aware of visual communication.17 Moreover, the "commercial art" employees, whether aware of it or not, were of major importance in the establishment of popular culture. In Canada the development of a popular culture followed a somewhat different course from that recorded in the English and European accounts. For much of its early history, fine art and commercial art were essentially the same thing and were, more often than not, produced by the same people. Unlike older societies with elitist and traditional working-class cultures, the Canadian variant was created from scratch; and because cultural development ran parallel to the growth of industrialization itself, commercial art was one of its essential components. Not only were artists part of the new commercial world, but they were also the founders of Canadian art. It is impossible to describe Canadian popular culture in terms of traditional rural or folk culture, as in the English situation. The only sources of traditional artistic expression in Canada were those of Native culture and those carried in settlers' "cultural baggage." Further, because the art of the former was initially ignored, concepts of both popular art and high art have grown out of the latter. Unfortunately, standard Canadian art histories have generally ignored the popular form. In the search for a "true" Canadian art, too often the impression has been given that fine art was the major preoccupation of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century artists. In fact, the majority of people considering themselves artists who were living and working in Canada in that period either worked for commercial companies as engravers, illustrators, photographers, or display artists, or they endeavoured to earn a living by teaching others. But the rhetoric of art history is frequently at variance with the facts. Although not emphasized in the traditional histories, the

11 Introduction great masters of the past were commissioned and remunerated by their employers. It was a factor that made little difference to their status as artists or to the acceptance of their work as "art." In many ways, the employment of such artists by wealthy patrons in the church or the court in the years before industrialization was similar to the employment of artists by publishers in the nineteenth century.18 It was with the impact of industrialization and commercialization that the social standards of the time - differentiating as they did between the status of "gentlemen" and those "in trade" - created a division between artists and commercial artists. There are few social histories of art, and those that do exist are more concerned with an intellectual analysis of style than with the social status of artists or the social factors behind the work they produce.19 In the Canadian context, in spite of William Colgate's recognition of the important position occupied by the commercial engraving houses in the development of Canadian art, the overall implication in the traditional art histories is that there is an accepted division between commercial art and fine art.20 Yet so many artists worked in both areas that to separate any discussion of their production into the two arenas can only be considered unhistorical. It may not be possible to accept the criticism that traditional art history is only art appreciation, but it is possible to argue that artists should be studied within their social and cultural context. A history of the graphic arts industry is one place where this can be done. Artists as workers within an area of industrial employment, and art as commercial production, can then be recognized as being not only part of the development of a popular culture but also part of a process capable of reintegrating art into "the common life of society." This study is therefore a historical inquiry into the development of the Canadian graphic arts as an industry, from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century to the 19405. Changes in technology and business practices following the Second World War determined this cut-off date. The terms "popular illustration" and "commercial art" are used to cover any form of reproduced image. "Illustrators" will variously refer to artists who drew or painted works for reproduction, as well as to the etchers, engravers, lithographers, and photo-engravers who produced the final plates for printing. The discussion will begin with the origins of reproducing images in England and will refer to

12. Art and Work

the art of wood engraving, the development of the printing trade and the popular press, the social status of engravers, and the place of Ruskin in the argument against a division in the arts. The narrative will then proceed to trace the transference of the English traditions to Canada. The artistic styles and reproductive processes of the early visiting engravers and etchers will be discussed, as will the work and difficulties experienced by many of the first engravers and lithographers to settle in Canada. But the main thrust of the study will concentrate on the beginnings of illustration as part of the modernization of Canadian life. This means that such areas as printing, the popular press, the retail trade, and advertising, along with the establishment of graphic arts houses, will be examined as part of a new commercial, industrial, and entrepreneurial approach to the provision of visual images. There are several difficulties, however, with regard to sources. Only a few of the major illustrators involved have left written records, and even these are often very limited. Where there are records, of course, these have been used. For example, James Smillie left an autobiography of his experiences as an engraver in nineteenth-century Quebec; there are records of George Desbarats and the founding of the Canadian Illustrated News; and the collection of the Brigden family and firm in Winnipeg and Toronto is unique in its size. As will be obvious in the study, the latter is invaluable as a primary source. Whatever the size of a graphic arts firm, art remained the focus of the whole enterprise, and success or failure depended on the creative skills of the employers and employees. Thus, a further aspect of the history of commercial illustration in Canada concerns its relationship to the wider art establishment as that developed. Many artists had no qualms about working for the graphic arts houses and, at other periods of their lives, working independently in the world of fine art. They were sufficiently confident in their skills to resist the suggestion that theirs was an inferior status. Others, however, chose to differentiate between their two forms of work, leaving the paid security of commissioned employment as soon as possible. In spite of these contrasting attitudes, illustrators, or commercial artists, many of whom came to be included among Canada's bestknown artists, were an integral part of both the formation of Canadian art and the expansion of popular communication.

2, The English Inheritance Artists, Engravers, and the Separation of the Arts

The history of popular illustration in Canada is directly related to the development of the commercial graphic arts industry in England. Late in the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, although American influence became strong, especially in the fields of advertising and printing technology, it was English reproductive processes and English pictorial styles that first influenced the development of commercial illustration in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere.1 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, etching on metal plates was the preferred medium of artists who wanted to reproduce their work. Some artists were extremely prolific, producing beautiful landscape prints and illustrations for special editions of the literary classics. This work, though produced for commercial sale, did not, however, constitute the makings of an industry. The foundation of the English graphic arts industry rested, instead, on the skill of wood engraving. During the course of the nineteenth century, wood engraving (which was initially thought of as either an art or a craft) was, along with many other crafts, gradually absorbed into the mechanized system created by the Industrial Revolution. Not only did it thus become the basis for a new form of production, but the wood engravers, subject to the introduction of specialized divisions of labour, became thought of as commercial employees

14

Art and Work

rather than independent artists or craftsmen. This change did not come about quickly, nor did it take place without criticism from the engravers themselves and from those members of the artistic community who were concerned with the growing division of the arts into "fine" and "applied" or "commercial" categories. With hindsight, it appears inevitable that such a situation would arise. The growth of the graphic arts industry complemented the rise of the printing industry and the subsequent development of popular mass communication. The products of the new industry, associated as they were with "trade," were not easily accepted into the gentlemanly world of fine art. By the 18505, a new cultural milieu began to emerge in England. The government's relaxation of taxes on newspapers, paper, and advertising, coupled with the steady progress of printing technology and the growth of a newly literate public, created an unprecedented demand for literature of all kinds and at all social levels. There was a boom in newspapers, popular magazines, books, and journals, many of which began to incorporate visual material into their texts. Illustrated newspapers and magazines became extremely popular, as did illustrated journals of science and nature, and illustrated novels of all types. At the same time, entrepreneurial commercial and industrial developments precipitated new forms of advertising. A need was thus created for large numbers of illustrators and wood engravers to provide the graphic work. The engravers, in turn, were able to keep up with the demand only because the progress in printing technology had reached a stage where it allowed their illustrations to be mass-produced. By the second half of the nineteenth century, as the historian Michael Twyman has noted, "the craft of wood-engraving [had] developed into a veritable industry."2 In the process of its alteration from an art or craft to an industry, it reflected both a new appreciation for visual communication on the part of the general public and a burgeoning recognition on the part of entrepreneurs of its value in the world of commerce. Although the term "graphic art" has been defined as the depiction of form by drawing, etching, engraving, or any other means of producing lines on a receptive medium, it has more commonly come to mean the transference of an image from one medium to another in order to produce a printed reproduction

15

The English Inheritance

of the original image. The most common process involves the transference to paper from metal, wood, or stone. In the case of engraving, a design is drawn on a metal plate or woodblock. It is incised, inked, and then transferred to paper by the use of pressure. The incision is carried out by one of two methods: relief or intaglio. The relief method involves removing those areas of the block that will leave the design in relief. It is a method that can be applied to metal cutting, wood cutting, or wood engraving. Intaglio, on the other hand, is a more complicated procedure whereby the lines, or spaces, of the drawn design are incised by the engraver's graver, or burin. Ink is then rubbed over and removed, leaving the ink in the incisions to be printed. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when prints of landscapes and portraits were the most popular commercial items, most engraving was of the intaglio type, on copper or steel plates. For instance, J.M.W. Turner, the great landscape artist, used steel plates for books of English and French topography. Processes such as mezzotint, stipple, and aquatint created effects on the metal plate that reproduced in the print as variations in line and texture. Aquatint was for many years the most popular process for reproducing water-colour paintings. Only the fact that the intaglio printing method precluded the representation of image and text on the same page prevented it from becoming the major process for illustrated books and magazines in the second half of the century.3 Reproduction of works of art was not new. The process was as old as printing itself. Woodcuts had been used to produce the first illustrated book in the fifteenth century; and from then until the nineteenth century, illustrations were made for books or issued separately, usually in black and white or coloured by hand.4 With the popularity of English landscape painting at the beginning of the century, and with the improvements in printing and publishing techniques, many leading artists became involved in publishing their works in book form or as individual prints. Turner, John Constable, John Sell Cotman, and David Cox were among those whose landscapes were engraved and published. Sometimes they engraved their own work, but on other occasions they employed professional engravers. Turner was a transitional figure between the older traditions of art and the new era of mass production. He had a healthy

16

Art and Work

respect for the commercial aspects of his profession and was one of the few major artists to accept with equanimity the arrival of the machine age. At the height of his fame as an established member of the Royal Academy, he was also producing designs for "almanacks and keepsakes."5 But the majority of artists did not have the advantage of Turner's genius and prestige. Most made their living in limited circumstances. They were not elected to the gentlemanly circles of the Royal Academy, but they were expected to be sufficiently competent to provide a wide variety of artistic services. For a considerable period, therefore, "the line between fine and applied arts" was not easily discernible.6 Advertising themselves as drawing masters, miniaturists, portrait painters, sculptors, engravers and lithographers, theatrescene painters, sign painters, and house painters, most artists demonstrated a considerable overlapping of skills. John Coppin, for instance, a member of the Norwich Society of Artists, was officially in business as a "house painter-gilder-glazier-plumber," and Ralph Beilby, Thomas Bewick's master, was not only an engraver and copperplate printer but also a decorator of "brass clock faces, door plates, coffin plates, book-binders' letters and stamps, steel silver and gold seals, mourning rings, etc."7 Artists' skills and teaching abilities were much in demand: drawing and painting were considered to be part of the education of any wellbred young woman, interior decoration was popular, and the need for engravers grew parallel with the demand for illustrated books and prints. But the social status of these artists was ambiguous and thus played a part in the gradual separation of the arts. It foreshadowed a situation in which the line between the practice of fine and applied art became more pronounced. Unlike Turner (who, in spite of the fact that his father was a barber, was admitted to the Royal Academy in 1802. at the age of twenty-seven), most working artists were unable to attain gentlemanly status. Although the Royal Academy, founded in 1769, had as one of its proclaimed aims the improvement of the social position of artists, the advantages were felt only by those who were already academicians. Those left out of the limited membership felt that "the word painter does not generally carry with it an idea equal to what we have of other professions."8 Engravers, who were excluded from membership altogether, were particularly frustrated. As early as 1775, the engraver

17 The English Inheritance

Robert Strange published Inquiry into the Rise and Establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts as a protest. He questioned the academy's definition of painters as members of a special group of imaginative, creative people, and of engravers as "servile copiers." Seventy years later, in 1845, Jorm Pye, Turner's close friend, who was considered by him to be one of the best engravers of his time, wrote a similar protest in Patronage of British Art: An Historical Sketch.9 Thomas Bewick, whose genius as both painter and engraver was recognized in his own time, was never made a member, and WJ. Linton, Bewick's most famous disciple, was "excluded forever from the Royal Academy."10 The artists whose work was bought and commissioned by members of the public, whose engravings were admired in prints and illustrated books, and whose talents were sought for the teaching of drawing and painting were gradually excluded from social acceptance by the same public that was starting to think of artists as "special people." It was the beginning of what has been described as "the myth of the artist."11 It was also the beginning of a process that divided the single family of artists men and women who traditionally worked in a variety of areas - into two groups: those who practised fine art (usually painters), and the rest. This development has been put into perspective most clearly by Raymond Williams in Culture and Society. He says: In this same period in which the market and the idea of specialist production received increasing emphasis there grew up, also, a system of thinking about the arts of which the most important elements are, first, an emphasis on the special nature of art activity as a means to "imaginative truth," and second, an emphasis on the artist as a special kind of person ... At a time when the artist is being described as just one more producer of a commodity for the market, he is describing himself as a specially endowed person.12

It is doubtful, of course, whether the majority of working artists thought of themselves as "specially endowed." Certainly, they accepted the premise that if they were to make a living, they had "to create a product or offer a service tempting enough to attract patronage." In 1817 James Stark, in an address to the

18 Art and Work

Norwich Society of Artists, warned against thinking that art could "subsist on the generosity of the public." Those wishing to work in the profession had to provide what was demanded by the society within which they lived.13 Only the few, therefore, could consider themselves as other than producers of a "commodity for the market." The glamour of patronage by royalty or government, the status of membership of the Royal Academy, and the recognition of foreign salons were rewards denied to the majority of practising artists. Yet it was from their ranks that the illustrators and engravers of the second half of the nineteenth century emerged. The prime requisite for the publishers of the illustrated magazines and newspapers, which, beginning in the 18405, were rapidly increasing in popularity, was a process that could produce clear illustrations in the minimum amount of time. It was also essential that such a process would permit the printing of illustration and text on the same page. Intaglio engraving was unsuitable for this purpose, and lithography (the process of printing from a design made on stone with the incompatible combination of oil and water), although suitable, was never popular in England for use with text.14 "Lurid" woodcuts were used for the earliest illustrated "penny" story magazines and for such newspapers as the Penny Weekly Dispatch and Bell's Penny Dispatch. In the early 18405, however, Herbert Ingram, a newsagent and former printer, noticed the increase in sales when papers and magazines included illustrations, and in 1842, he founded the Illustrated London News, using wood engravings to accompany the printing of news and contemporary events.15 From then until nearly the end of the century, when it began to be overtaken by photographic techniques, wood engraving remained the major process of visual reproduction for publications of all kinds. All the major periodicals - the Penny Magazine, the Mirror, Punch, the Saturday Magazine, and the Graphic - used wood engravings for their illustrations. Engravers and illustrators were thus needed on an ever-increasing scale. Artists were recruited from all branches of the arts to work for the illustrated press. According to Paul Hogarth, "there were water colourists who had worked for publishers of the travel portfolios, topographical draughtsmen of military surveys and scientific expeditions, painters who needed financial security and

19 The English Inheritance

illustrators who sought an escape from the sedentary world of the Victorian table book."16 The artists and illustrators who provided the pictorial items were of major importance in starting off the reproduction process, but it was the wood engravers who were ultimately responsible for producing an image which, when printed, was both recognizable and stylistically acceptable. Some art historians describe this type of commercial work as having led to a "general lowering of quality," but others conclude that it was the "hundreds of skilled draughtsmen, some of them hardly known today, [who] helped to make the second half of the nineteenth century one of the finest periods in English illustration."17 Wood engraving, in the manner it was used by the nineteenthcentury popular press, owed its beginnings to two sources: first, to the style of engraving created by Thomas Bewick and, second, to the mechanization of printing. Bewick perfected a new method of incising woodblocks for printing; and the steam press, invented during his lifetime, allowed his impressions and those of his pupils to be spread throughout Europe and North America.18 Thomas Bewick was born in Newcastle in 1753 and was apprenticed to the engraver Ralph Beilby at the age of fourteen. His natural skills were such that by 1776, at the end of his apprenticeship, he was awarded a "premium," or prize, from the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, and in 1777 he joined Beilby as his partner. Because Beilby's inclination and aptitude were primarily for metal intaglio engraving, Bewick found himself taking over most of the commissions that required the use of wood. What resulted was a new form of engraving, which allowed detail and shading to be expressed in wood with a delicacy and clarity not seen before. Traditionally, engravers had used woodblocks cut on the grain and had made their relief images by removing the wood between the lines of the previously drawn image. It was a technique known as "black line" and had been used by such artists as Diirer and Holbein, as well as by the illustrators of the early printed books and by many less accomplished artists. Bewick reversed the whole process by engraving across the end grain of the wood and by thinking of the block as black, with the white lines creating the image. He drew or painted his pictures on boxwood (a hardwood much

io Art and Work

preferred by engravers) and, with tools similar to the ones used for fine metal engraving, incised the lines. He produced effects that were, as his biographer Iain Bain says, "capable of the most exquisite touches of light and shade."19 He had, in fact, created a new form of artistic expression. Bewick was a countryman and nature lover: his most famous illustrated books were of birds and animals. He engraved and published A General History of Quadrupeds in 1789, and in 1797 the first edition of A History of British Birds. These works, and numerous others, went into many editions. They ensured Bewick's fame and led to the extension of his reputation and his method of engraving outside England. John James Audubon, the American artist and ornithologist, who visited Bewick in 1827, maintained that "Bewick was the first engraver on wood that England [had] produced" and that no one could equal him.20 This was a tribute to Bewick's art, given by one artist to another. In the context of commercial illustration, Bewick's contribution was immense. In the speeded-up conditions of the 18405, although the majority of engravers no longer created their own designs, the white-line technique could easily be adapted to the demands of the illustrated press for clear reproductions. Inevitably, the freshness of Bewick's art could not be maintained, but through his pupils and their apprentices a tradition developed that produced artists and engravers of the highest order.21 It was the industrialization of printing which, together with the new form of engraving, provided the breakthrough in the commercial reproduction of visual images. Bewick had used the traditional wooden press, customarily used for printing type. Ink was applied by a leather ball, which was dabbed on an inked surface and then applied to the type and woodblocks. The type and blocks, with their engraved surfaces, were then locked together, covered with paper and slid under the flat platen of the press. The platen, with its attached tympan, was then lowered by a lever, which turned a wooden screw. The ink was pressed onto the paper and the print was made.22 But this was not a satisfactory system for the reproduction of fine wood engravings. Although Bewick was not a printer, he was aware of printing techniques, and he adapted his methods to overcome some of the difficulties. For instance, by lowering areas of his cuts, he could allow for lighter printing where desired, and by

ii

The English Inheritance

lowering the edges of the block, he could prevent overloading of ink at the sides of the print. But the whole process was timeconsuming and inefficient, taking three men an hour to produce sixty copies.23 It was not the sort of operation that would lend itself to mass production. Change was signalled for the engravers in 182.1. In that year, the bed-and-platen press was invented by the American printer Daniel Treadwell. Although it was at first worked by a hand lever, the bed-and-platen press offered greater control over the pressure exerted on the print. Bewick found that it solved most of his earlier problems, enabling him, by 1826, to reproduce mechanically many of his earlier blocks. Made of iron, with movable beds and inking rollers, the bed-and-platen press was easily adapted to steam, becoming one of the most useful and popular presses - even after the more productive cylindrical steam presses were invented. By the time of Bewick's death in 1828, the revolution in the reproduction of images, which he had helped to initiate, had become part of the overall revolution in the process of printing itself. In 1811 the German inventor Friedrich Konig adapted steam to drive the printing press. By 1814, with the introduction of cylinders, his machines had become, in the words of a contemporary, "the greatest improvement connected with printing since the discovery of the art itself."24 Steam-driven machines were not accepted easily, however. The transformation of a traditional craft into an industry was not taken lightly by its skilled craftsmen. Machines were not infrequently wrecked by hand-pressmen when efforts were made to introduce them into printing workshops. In fact, the installation of Konig's press at the Times in 1814 had to be carried out in secret. Progress was therefore comparatively slow. By 182.0 there were only eight steam presses in London, and even by 1851 there were only 130 members of the Printing Machine Managers Trade Society.25 The transformation of the printing trade was, however, underway. The Times, for example, with the installation of the new press, was able to print 1,000 sheets of newsprint in an hour, instead of the 250 produced by the hand press. This lowered the cost of printing, thereby permitting the publication of larger and cheaper editions. By 182,8, the Times had introduced an even more efficient press, the Applegarth. Built

2.2.

Art and Work

by Augustus Applegarth and Edward Cowper, it had four cylinders and could produce up to 4,000 sheets per hour. Throughout the century new machines were manufactured at the request of printing and publishing firms, with newspaper managers designing machines to suit their own particular needs. In 1855, for instance, Joseph Parsons, printing manager of the Graphic, had a machine built to his own specifications, and in 1873, after the development of the rotary press machines (which could produce up to 24,000 pages an hour by the end of the century), the printing company of Bradbury and Agnew had a machine specially made for the Weekly Budget. In 1876, most importantly for the development of the graphic arts industry, WJ. Ingram, publisher of the Illustrated London News, designed a complicated rotary machine (subsequently named after him) that could adapt the curve of the printing cylinders to accommodate engraved plates.26 It enabled him to make the reproduction of engravings the most important aspect of his publication. Other technical inventions added to the increased productivity of printing. The mechanical manufacture of paper, invented in France and established in England in 1803, raised the output of paper, which had been between 60 and 100 pounds daily from the hand mills, to 1,000 pounds daily from machines. This meant that by 1843 tne cost °f paper had been halved. The incorporation of wood pulp into the manufacture of paper also led to the production of cheaper newsprint and cheaper paper for the book trade. Inventions for the automatic casting of type and for bookbinding and composing were all developed during the nineteenth century, their principles remaining much the same until the use of electricity and photography transformed printing into modern terms.27 Alterations and improvements were made, ideas copied, and patents taken out. But it was not only the introduction of large machines that transformed the printing trade. The power-driven "jobbing platen," for example, the descendant of Treadwell's bed-and-platen press, became indispensable for all the small jobs resulting from the expansion in trade and industry. Used for such items as business cards, letterheads, advertising material, and stationery, it became a fixture in all print shops, large and small. By the end of the century, improvements in the rotary press had succeeded in revolutionizing printing. The whole structure

2.3 The English Inheritance

of the printing trade was altered. Changes had started to take place as a result of the first steam cylinder press, but in those days it had still been possible for the preparatory processes to be performed by the skilled printer. Traditionally, printers had described their trade as an "art" or "mystery." With the rotary press, the entire operation was made automatic, causing the idea of the printer as artist or craftsman to become obsolete. The ancient art of printing became an industry, and the men who worked in it became participants in a new type of social organization.28 The industrialization of printing was obviously a major factor in the growth of the popular press in the nineteenth century. But as the historian Geoffrey Best has noted, "no single cause can be alleged" to account for the seemingly unlimited market for literature of all kinds or for the "unprecedented explosion of the newspaper press."29 Certain factors did, however, make the period ripe for this explosion. The government tax on newspapers, levied in 1819 to counteract the publication of radical literature, was lowered from fourpence to one penny in 1835 and was abolished altogether in 1855.30 By the 18408, the cost of paper production was halved, and in 1861 the excise tax on paper was removed. It was possible, therefore, by mid-century, to produce books, magazines, and newspapers for all classes of society at a price that all could afford; and there was, in a society that was becoming increasingly conscious of the marketplace, a demand. As Best says, "by the fifties a large and still enlarging middle-cum-working-class public was ready to read all the cheap literature it could get."31 The growth of general literacy also played a role in the demand for popular literature. Unsatisfactory as the educational system for the working classes may have been, the majority of English people were literate by the 18305; and as the century progressed, with its compulsory education for children, its adult education programs, and its working-men's institutes, so the number of readers increased.32 For the upper classes, the availability of literature had never been a problem, but now, for the first time, members of the working and middle classes were able to obtain reading material at a price they could afford. Cheap editions of novels, scientific manuals, books on domestic management, and famous works of literature were, by 1849,

24 Art and Work

available to all. They were published as "standard works" and cost sevenpence, eightpence, or ninepence. The novels of Dickens and Trollope were published in instalments at a shilling a month, while the works of Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hughes, Wilkie Collins, and Mrs Gaskell appeared in cheap monthly serial magazines. Weekly and monthly journals and periodicals were published for all tastes. From intellectual journals such as the Fortnightly Review and Contemporary Review, to "family papers" and religious magazines, to the "racy" Lloyds and Reynold's Weekly, all sections of society were catered for. It has been calculated that the total circulation of non-daily Londonpublished periodicals during 1864 amounted to 2,203,000 of the popular variety, 2,404,000 of more serious matter (including religious and educational tracts), and 2,490,000 monthly editions.33 The same demand for daily newspapers - the Times, the Daily News, the Daily Telegraph, the Morning Chronicle, and an increasing number of provincial and suburban papers - supports Best's claim that "the mid-Victorian's appetite for newspapers was, like his appetite for other inexpensive periodicals and cheap books, insatiable."34 Within this extraordinary development of the popular press, illustrated material was increasingly valued by the publishers of magazines and newspapers. For example, as early as 1832, the educational and religious weekly magazines, the Penny Magazine and the Saturday Magazine, were using illustrations to promote their message of self-improvement. With the publication of the satirical magazine Punch in 1841 and the Illustrated London News in 1842, a new popular market was generated for political cartoons, for portrait reproductions of the famous, and for illustrated reports of international news and special events. While magazines such as the Pictorial Times, the Illustrated Times, Fun, and Judy used illustrations freely, newspapers did not begin to print them on a regular basis until near the end of the century. In 1890 the Daily Graphic began to use wood engravings at the same time as it introduced the new processes of photo-engraving and half-tone,35 and in 1904 the Daily Mirror was using half-tone blocks made from photographs. Within a few years, it had a photo-engraving department that was capable of producing results in half an hour. Other papers and periodicals followed suit, so that by the beginning of the

25

The English Inheritance

twentieth century, illustrators and engravers, like printers, found themselves working within a new industrial situation. The Illustrated London News is generally considered to have been the motivating force in the establishment of the graphic arts as an industry. Certainly, its founder, Herbert Ingram, qualifies as an entrepreneur aware of the changes about to take place in industrialized society. Although a printer by trade, he had made his fortune by selling a laxative, "Parr's Life Pills." This piece of commercial activity enabled him to move to London and establish himself as publisher of the most successful and influential illustrated journal of the time. The engraver WJ. Linton said in his memoirs that while Ingram had little literary talent or appreciation of the arts, "he had a kind of intuitive faculty of judging what would please the ordinary public." He chose good editors, good illustrators, and "the best draughtsmen on wood" available. As a result, the paper "had the good fortune to meet a public want."36 The type of journal introduced by Ingram and continued by his son William (the designer of the Ingram rotary press) was to have far-reaching effects both at home and abroad. In its acceptance of illustrated printed material as part of modern industrial life, Ingram's publication not only foreshadowed the emergence of such publishing giants as Alfred Harmsworth and the "press lords" of the twentieth century, but it also led to the creation of the commercial engraving houses that were essential for the illustrations themselves. The format of the Illustrated London News and similar publications consisted of items of news from all parts of the world, reports of royal and other social events in England, and coverage of any occurrence of public interest. "Special artists" were dispatched to report on events in any area of the world.37 They covered the Crimean and Franco-Prussian wars, expeditions and surveys in the colonies, and, closer to home, trials, exhibitions, and new railway lines. All were reported on and duly illustrated. Rapid sketches were made on the spot and were engraved as soon as they were received by the engraving firms in London. Artists such as John Gilbert, Kenny Meadows, and William Harvey became expert draughtsmen and illustrators, providing prepared drawings for the engravers or engraving them themselves. Such work was often devalued by later critics. It has been described as having a sense of "vagueness and generalization"

2.6

Art and Work

because of the engravers' reliance on the "stock block." This type of block was pre-engraved. It could be adapted to a variety of requirements and could have its context changed by the use of alternative captions. Undoubtedly, busy engravers did use the device on occasion, but the critical attitude towards commercial engraving is overly severe and seems to stem from individual artists' claims that their drawings were ruined by engravers.38 Recognition of the difficulties under which engravers worked offers a different interpretation. For the most part, the engraving houses that supplied work for the Illustrated London News and other illustrated publications employed highly skilled illustrators and engravers. These people were forced to work at great speed and were dependent on the cooperation of the artists whose drawings they were given to engrave; but unless the engravers had clear designs to work from, they were unable to reproduce the artists' intentions. It is this factor that has frequently been overlooked by those critical of the work done. Given the circumstances in which the engravers worked, one might marvel that they were able to produce the quality of work they did. By 1840 there was, in David Sander's words, "a whole new breed of men and women who worked ... all day peering through magnifying glasses at small blocks of wood and cutting the pictures that illuminated an entire century."39 These were the commercial engravers who, until the introduction of photography, provided most of the visual material through which the events and personalities of the Victorian age have been recorded. Thomas Bewick, in his memoirs written between the years 1822 and 1827, had already commented on the possibility that the use of engravings "will know no end."40 What he had not foreseen was that in the process of becoming the most popular and available art form of its time, engraving would cease to be thought of as art and would become a commercial commodity produced for the market, with the engraver demoted to "superior artisan." The historian F.B. Smith has summed up the position of the engravers in the 18405, pointing out that they "were well paid for their product, but they remained mechanical process craftsmen in a market situation; the sketches they engraved were rarely their own and they were rarely the publishers of the illustrations that resulted; payment for their work

zy

The English Inheritance

was usually determined by the publisher." Smith added that although engravers, after a fairly inexpensive outlay for tools and other equipment, were assured of a "steady trade with an expanding market," master engravers were not accorded the status of "gentleman" as artists were.41 Among the master engravers, there were in fact many who should have been accorded the status of gentleman as well as artist. Such men as John Orrin Smith, WJ. Linton, Joseph Swain, and George and Edward Dalziel owned their own engraving houses, employed other engravers, and trained apprentices. They were financially comfortable, were well trained in all aspects of engraving, and were concerned to hand their skills on to their pupils. However, because of the vast amount of material required by the illustrated press, much of the work credited to the master engravers was produced by their employees.42 This arrangement was one means of satisfying the demand. Other methods, more industrial in nature, were introduced to speed up the work process. For instance, there was specialization not only between illustrators and engravers but also within their separate areas. The "illustrator-draughtsmen," who drew or painted the designs on the blocks, specialized in landscapes or catastrophes or portraits, or such prosaic items as machinery for manufacturers' catalogues. The engravers specialized even further. Some concentrated on faces, some on clothing, while others were limited to backgrounds or buildings. By the 18508, a technique had been introduced whereby separate blocks could be bolted together at the back in order to make large prints possible. Individual engravers worked on the separate blocks and thus might be unaware of the appearance of the whole.43 The reputation of an engraving firm was made on the speed at which it worked and the quality of the material it produced. Joseph Swain's firm, which engraved the blocks for Punch, could have the main cartoon ready within twenty-four hours of receiving the drawing, while the Dalziel brothers were so successful that their business eventually expanded into printing and publishing. They engraved Edward Lear's Nonsense Books and the works of Pre-Raphaelite painters, and also acted as art editors of other publications and commissioned illustrations for books they were publishing themselves.44 In addition, they undertook such general work as the illustrations for the Coalbrookdale

28 Art and Work

Foundry catalogue. Indeed, pictorial advertising was becoming increasingly important not only to Victorian business as a whole but to the engraving firms themselves. By the i86os, their advertisements were appearing in the Printers Register, with offers of "Wood Engraving in all its Branches, with superior Finish, Economy and Dispatch," and "Specimens, with terms and References, sent on application." The sample engravings that accompanied such advertisements indicated the standards offered.45 The best known of the artist-engravers and the one who probably had most influence on the development of commercial illustration and engraving, especially in its transfer to the Canadian context, was WJ. Linton. His firm, Smith and Linton (first a partnership with John Orrin Smith and later with Harvey Orrin Smith), was not a financial success like that of the Dalziel brothers, mainly because of Linton's literary and political activities. But it was held in high regard by leading artists and publishers of the time. For many years it supplied the Illustrated London News with its illustrations, working from the drawings of Gilbert, Meadows, Harvey, and others. It provided "copies of pictures by the old masters, and paintings in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy," as well as engravings, for Bell's Life of London, of the winners of the Ascot and Epsom race meetings.46 Linton's importance lies in his continuation of the techniques of Thomas Bewick and in his resistance to the separation of the arts. Poet, editor, and ardent radical, William Linton was born in London in 1812. His father, a builder and architect, recognizing a talent in his son, provided him with drawing lessons and in 1828 apprenticed him to the wood engraver George Wilmot Bonner. This placed the young Linton, as Smith says, "in the mainstream of nineteenth-century engraving." Bonner had been a pupil of Robert Branston and was a contemporary of Bewick's. Although not in the same league as Bewick, Branston had adopted the new technique of white-line engraving. In his memoirs, Linton records his training. Bonner's pupils not only prepared their own blocks from the boxwood logs but also drew and sketched for their own engravings: "I recollect being sent up the Thames to sketch the 'Red House' at Battersea ... and the old wooden bridge between Putney and

2.9 The English Inheritance

Fulham."47 Like Bewick before him, his training was far more extensive than some accounts of the commercial engravers would lead one to believe. Linton was a great admirer of Bewick's style. "My life through," he wrote, "I have sought to maintain [it] as the only artistic method of engraving in wood."48 When he joined John Orrin Smith in partnership in 1842, he found himself among artists who had either trained under Bewick or been influenced by him. William Harvey, Luke Clennel, Charlton Nesbit, and Bewick's son Robert all influenced Linton. Like Bewick, they had skills in drawing and painting as well as in engraving. The belief in engraving as an art that required knowledge beyond the actual carving of wood was one that Linton inherited from Bewick and in turn passed on to his pupils. Austin Dobson, author of Thomas Bewick and His Pupils, recognized this in 1884 when he dedicated a copy of his book to Linton with the words "Engraver and Poet, the steadfast apostle of Bewick's white line."49 Always aware of the pitfalls inherent in the mechanical copying of others' work, Linton emphasized to his pupils that the engraver should be the "collaborator" of the artist, not the "mere servant" or "servile copier" in the translation of original work into print. Like Robert Strange and John Pye earlier, he strongly resented the exclusion of engravers from "artist" status, and he encouraged his fellow engravers to think of themselves as "members in the great Guild of Art" instead of "mere mechanics."50 This idealism, however, did little to improve the social or economic situation of engravers. Linton, the political radical, involved with the Chartist movement, with radical publications, and with Giuseppe Mazzini and other political figures, was not much concerned with such practical organizations as trade unions. He was a much-admired if somewhat remote figure to his pupils, most of whom did not, of course, have the financial status of a master engraver. The period from 1855 to 1870 is often described as the "golden age" of English illustration. Many leading artists participated in the illustration of novels and books of verse. The Pre-Raphaelite artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt, as well as James McNeill Whistler and Arthur Hughes, all created designs which they

30 Art and Work

drew directly onto engravers' blocks. It has also been implied that this was a transitional period, with illustration being described as "a dubious mixture of art and something that is not art."51 Whether this was true or not, what does become apparent from this time on is that the illustrators, the artists who provided designs for engravers, became as affected by the changes in the reproduction of images as the engravers were. Linton, who in 1855 had entered into partnership with Harvey Orrin Smith, was involved two years later in the production of an illustrated publication of Tennyson's Poems. Using illustrations by Rossetti, Millais, and others, this was one of the first books to relate the typography to the illustrations in order to create a harmonious design.52 Its publication was an early instance of the drawing together of the various elements essential for the functioning of a successful graphic arts business: illustrators, engravers, typographers, and printers were all involved in the reproducing of images complementary to the written word. For Linton, however, this was not enough. In spite of producing a number of beautiful and highly successful books, including an illustrated Shakespeare and an illustrated guide to the Lake District, he became increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of recognition afforded engravers and illustrators in England. In 1866 he left for the United States where, though making frequent visits to England, he remained for the rest of his life. There he received the social status that had been denied him in his own country and became an important influence on the developing American school of illustration and engraving.53 Meanwhile, his influence continued in England, especially as it affected the growing divisions within the arts. As Walter Crane wrote in 1896, Linton had given to his pupils "a sense of necessary relationship between design, material and method of production - of art and craft, in fact, - which ... has had its effect in many ways."54 Some of the pupils in Linton's workshop during this period have left descriptions of the conditions under which engravers worked. Their records also unwittingly demonstrate the divisions that were becoming accepted within the trade itself. Walter Crane, for instance, emphasized in his reminiscences that he had apprenticed with Linton as an artist-draughtsman,55 while Frederick Brigden, who apprenticed as an engraver, referred to

3i

The English Inheritance

himself as having been "a little art-workman."56 Yet their training was much the same; and when, in 1859 and 1860, respectively, Crane, the son of a London artist, and Brigden, the deaf son of a Sussex saddler, were accepted for their three-year apprenticeships by Linton, they both had their indenture fees waived because of their apparent artistic talents.57 In their memoirs they both commented on Linton's skills and on the kindness of Orrin Smith, who was responsible for the apprentices. In particular, Brigden was relieved to find that Smith was able to communicate in sign language. This accomplishment was essential in a trade in which many deaf (and sometimes dumb) youths were apprenticed to wood engraving.58 Crane has left an account of Linton's workshop, which was, he says, "a typical wood-engraver's office" of the period: [There was] a row of engravers at work at a fixed bench covered with green baize running the whole length of the room under the windows with eyeglass stands and rows of engravers. And for night work, a round table with a gas lamp in the centre, surrounded with a circle of large clear glass globes filled with water to magnify the light and concentrate it on the blocks upon which the engravers ... worked, resting them upon small circular leather bags or cushions filled with sand, upon which they could easily be held and turned about by the left hand while being worked upon with the tool in the right. There were, I think, three or four windows, and I suppose room for about a dozen engravers; the experienced hands, of course, in the best light, and the prentice hands between them.59

It was an arrangement that lent itself to the increased specialization of the industrializing period and one that remained standard for the rest of the century. It also, in the i88os, became the system adopted in Canadian workshops. Yet in spite of the specialization - whereby the "master" might engrave the head of a portrait, leaving his apprentices to fill in the rest - and in spite of the increasing emphasis on speed of delivery, the apprentices received as extensive a training as in Bewick's day. Brigden, for instance, recorded in his diaries and letters that he had to study "tone, letters, tints, tools, shading for folds, arms, landscapes ... faces, water ... cross lines, land-effect principles," as well as drawing; and the work he was set to engrave included

32, Art and Work portraits, landscapes, and drawings to accompany comic broadsheets.60 Both Crane and Brigden later commented on their lack of money. An apprentice's salary was ten shillings a week, but whereas Crane lived with his family in London, Brigden lived "in a little back room ... as much cupboard as bed room, in a big house, fit for a Dickens' mystery."61 An ambiguity about the growing separation between artists and engravers seems marked in their recollections. Crane says that he emerged from Linton's workshop in 1862 "a fully matured artist with settled aims and a decided style of my own."62 Brigden, on the other hand, although employed by the Illustrated London News at the end of his apprenticeship, continued to refer to himself as an "artworkman."63 In spite of these perceived differences, however, they were both profoundly affected by Linton's theories on art. While Linton never attempted to influence his pupils politically, he did succeed in passing on his belief in the unity of art. Linton's views on the social position of artists and the need for unity in the arts predated those of Arthur Mackmurdo and the Arts and Crafts Movement, as well as those of William Morris. They reflected the theories of John Ruskin, the "great man" of Victorian art criticism. Crane and Brigden, like all students of the arts in the second half of the nineteenth century, treated Ruskin with awe and respect. Indeed, Brigden, seeking to supplement his artistic training, attended Ruskin's lectures on art and drawing at the London Working Men's College. He described Ruskin as "a sort of Art Missionary, introducing religious sentiment into art culture."64 Ruskin's books, including Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice, were the first works of art criticism in England to analyse the genius of Turner, to recognize the aims of the Pre-Raphaelites, and to support, albeit unknowingly, the perception theories of the French Impressionists. His essays on art and politics were published in book form, and his Elements of Drawing, published in 1857, was partially based on the lectures he gave at the Working Men's College.65 Ruskin was the first to recognize what was taking place in the art community as a result of the divisions created within a previously integrated profession. Devoting much of his writing and lecturing to pointing out the social consequences of such a change, Ruskin repeatedly emphasized the need for art to remain

33

The English Inheritance

in touch with everyday concerns. He argued that if the fine arts became separated too far from the arts of "utility" and the general public, art would be practised and appreciated only by a small group of connoisseurs. As a result, the divisions started by the Royal Academy in the eighteenth century would be taken to extremes. In his lecture "The Division of the Arts," Ruskin said: "Under the present system, you keep our Academician occupied only in producing painted pieces of canvas to be shown in frames and smooth pieces of marble to be placed in niches; while you expect your builder or constructor to design coloured patterns in stone and brick and your chinaware merchant to keep a separate body of workmen who can paint china but nothing else. By this division of labour, you ruin all the arts at once."66 He analysed the impersonalization of the worker that occurred in the industrialized society of Victorian England in its relation to art, deploring a system that allowed the creator of beautiful pictures to "be taken away and made a gentleman and have a studio" while others produced his designs for him. He said that such an arrangement was founded "upon two mistaken assumptions: the first, that one man's thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by another man's hands; the second, that manual labour is a degradation, when it is governed by intellect." There should be no division, said Ruskin, between those whose imagination creates designs and those who put the designs into practice. Nor, he held, should there be a separation between art and society. In a well-ordered society (which he called "good"), only "good" art was possible. Such divisions as "fine" and "applied" (or "commercial") would not then apply. In "The Nature of Gothic," Ruskin emphasized that only "excellence of achievement" was important, not whether the producer was "artist" or "workman"; the "distinction between one man and another," he maintained, should be "only in experience and skill."67 Ruskin and his disciples William Morris and Arthur Mackmurdo took the literal meaning of art back to its original definition of "skill." For Morris, this meant a return to the standards of hand-workmanship and the plurality of skills possessed by artists before the advent of industrialization.68 Mackmurdo, on the other hand, while not accepting mechanical means of design and production, recognized the need for good

34 Art and Work

design within industry and urged the development of design as an entity in itself.69 Both men were dedicated to the ideal of the "craftsman as artist" and, in the tradition of Ruskin, saw the concept of "art for art's sake" as leading only to the eventual decline of all the arts. In The Art of the People (1879), Morris said that the quality of art produced was dependent on the society within which it was created. He saw no value in "art for art's sake," which became "an art cultivated professedly by a few, and for a few, who would consider it necessary ... to despise the common herd."70 Such an art, argued Morris, would eventually become "too delicate a thing for even the hands of the initiated to touch." Only the return of art to the people, "to the pleasure of life ... to our daily labour," would be able to reunite art and society. By the last quarter of the century, there had thus arisen an intellectual critique of the state of the arts. The theories of Ruskin, the politicization of art and society as interpreted by Morris, and the Arts and Crafts Movement founded by Mackmurdo were all concerned, as Raymond Williams has emphasized, with the need for the "reintegration of art with the common life of society."71 In spite of this need for integration, the progression that saw the gradual decline of the artist-craftsman and the growth of a new industry was not halted. The position of the wood engravers by the 18705 was radically different from that at the beginning of the century. While Bewick and his contemporaries had not been accorded gentleman status or admission to the Royal Academy, their names were known and their skills admired. In contrast to the facsimile engravers in Linton's studio, they were still considered artist-craftsmen. With the introduction of photoengraving in the i88os, the wood engravers either retrained to become part of the new technical process or worked in a declining trade.72 The rise of the artist-aesthete and the concept of "art for art's sake" also reduced the status of the artist-illustrator or designer. As Henry Furst said in reference to the arts of 1890, art was "almost entirely in the hands of men whose connection with theories and literature [was] closer than their connection with practices and life."73 Illustrators either became completely dissociated from the reproductive side of the new industry or, as in the case of Walter Crane, they became advocates of the theories of the Arts and Crafts Movement, turning their

35

The English Inheritance

designing skills into new fields of colour and printing. Eventually they were to become the "commercial artists" of the twentieth century. It was a process that was part of the overall change taking place in industrial society, and one that inevitably led to a form of class differentiation in the arts.74 Because of the specialization of labour arising from the new technology and because of the acceptance of visual advertising, engravers and illustrators were drawn into a complex system of graphic arts firms, commercial art agencies, and reproductive technologies.75 The status of those working in the area of the reproduction of images may have led, as Williams says, to "a hardening of specific judgements into presumptions of classes, based now not only on mixed criteria ... but also ... on criteria which are incompatible with the original delimitation by the nature of the practice;"76 to a situation, in other words, in which a commercial artist was judged not as a bona fide artist but as someone automatically inferior. It has to be acknowledged, however, that the new industrialization of the graphic arts provided employment. As historian Susan Meyer has pointed out, the publishing industry "emerged as the chief employer of artists. The publications succeeded both church and court as the great showcase for artists, and illustration, a creation of the Industrial Revolution, became a significant avenue for the artist."77 In England during the nineteenth century, the art of visual reproduction, with its related trade of printing, changed from a skill practised by individual artist-craftsmen to a part of the new industrialized process. For both engravers and illustrators, the development of the graphic arts into an industry meant a change in social status and a change in opportunity. While still retaining Ruskinian ideals of the unity of art, craft, and society, these art workers found themselves caught up in the external influences of commercial enterprise and new technology. On the one hand, their social position as artists or artist-craftsmen declined as the result of association with commercial activity ("trade"); and, on the other, their hopes for advancement in their own field of expertise were affected by the introduction of such mechanical inventions as photography and photo-engraving. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that many of them decided to seek their fortunes outside England.

3 Transferring the Traditions Visitors and Immigrants

Before the establishment of an industrial milieu that was suitable for the emergence of a popular illustrated press, many of the illustrators who worked in Canada were visitors. From the late seventeenth century to the mid-i84os, artists accompanied exploration and surveying parties, and provided a record of the Canadian scene that was published, usually abroad, in singlesheet prints or in folios or books. Even if some of these prints were published in North America, they were invariably (at least, until the late eighteenth century) printed in England or in continental Europe. As well, there were immigrant engravers and lithographers who attempted to make their living as independent artist-craftsmen. They worked for government or military agencies and occasionally produced single-sheet prints for sale by enterprising publishers. Like their counterparts in eighteenthcentury England, they were accustomed to practising a variety of skills, turning their hands to map making, jewellery engraving, and visiting-card embossing with equal dexterity. Some of these "art-workmen" succeeded in establishing themselves, but many, like James Smillie, found that they were working in an environment that was not yet ready for them. It was not until the industrialization of paper making, the mechanization of the printing press, the development of cities with transportation facilities and commercialized advertising, and the

37 Transferring the Traditions

growing demands of an increasingly literate public, that the reproduction of visual images became a viable occupation. In other words, the same climate was necessary in Canada as it was in England and elsewhere before a graphic arts industry could emerge. In terms of the images produced, the type of people who produced them, and the processes used, Canadian development paralleled that of England, albeit at a later date. The prime requisite for the reproduction of visual images, the printing press, was not available in Canada until the mid-eighteenth century, and even then it was not always suitable for pictorial printmaking. In 1751 the Bostonian printer Bartholomew Green established Canada's first printing press in Halifax. It was taken over by John Bushell in 1752. and was used to publish the Halifax Gazette. But the early gazettes were not newspapers; they were simply sheets "by which laws were proclaimed and public announcements made."1 They had a serious intent and were not suitable for the publication of visual images. Presses were established in Quebec City in 1764, in Montreal in the 17705, in New Brunswick and the Island of Saint John (Prince Edward Island) in the 17805, and in Upper Canada (Ontario) in the 17905. As in Nova Scotia, the first publications were gazettes that were concerned primarily with governmental, political, and colonial affairs. Yet illustration was to follow the same pattern of development. Engravers and lithographers established themselves first in Nova Scotia and Quebec in the 17905 and then in Upper Canada in the early years of the nineteenth century.2 While this slow progress was underway, visiting artists were providing English, French, and American markets with visual material for engraved reproduction.3 This was in the form of single-sheet prints or prints for illustrated books. The artists were frequently amateurs: military officers stationed temporarily on garrison duty in the Canadian colonies or surveyors travelling with exploration parties.4 Occasionally, professional artists accompanied voyages of discovery and had their work published in the resulting books of travel experiences. John Webber, for example, accompanied James Cook's third voyage and had his work engraved for publication in A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean in 1784. John Sykes was with George Vancouver from 1790 to 1795, and George Back was with John Franklin during his polar

38 Art and Work expeditions of the early iSzos.5 Their sketches and watercolours were duly engraved and published in England, and contributed to the ever-growing popularity of books of travel. The work of the visiting artists was carried out in the currently popular style of the Picturesque and was reproduced through the intaglio method of engraving on copper or steel plates. That these stylistic and technical elements became an integral part of early Canadian reproductive art can best be illustrated through the work of the visiting English artist William Henry Bartlett. Born in 1809, Bartlett was a professional artist with a keen interest in travel. Much of his early work was for illustrated books on English cities and counties. In 1838, following visits to the United States in 1836 and 1837, he came to Canada under the auspices of the London publisher George Virtue. He had been commissioned to provide illustrations for Canadian Scenery Illustrated, one of a number of volumes produced by Virtue on the scenery of North America. First announced for publication in 1840, the final two-volume edition of Canadian Scenery consisted of 117 steel engravings by Bartlett with a text by the American travel writer Nathaniel Willis. Initially, the work was published in monthly issues, each issue consisting of four engravings and eight to twelve pages of text. The instalments were published quarterly in issues of twenty engravings and forty-four pages of text,6 These issues were available for sale in both Canada and England and could, presumably, have anticipated commercial productivity. But the process used to transfer Bartlett's drawings into print was that of engraving on metal and was thus not as conducive to repeated reproduction as wood engraving proved to be. The reproductive process favoured by Bartlett and Virtue did, however, provide a direct link between Canada and the English artistic traditions, especially those of J.M.W. Turner. Not only did Bartlett follow Turner in his use of sepia drawings as the most suitable to guide engravers,7 and not only did he favour the use of steel plates over copper, but three of the engravers who worked on his drawings, R. Wallis, R. Brandard, and J.T. Willmore, had been trained by Turner.8 (It had been found that more impressions could be taken from steel plates than copper, and engravers trained by Turner were certainly at the top of their profession.) In his style and choice of subject

39 Transferring the Traditions

matter, Bartlett also reflected English preoccupations. The Picturesque style favoured by Turner and his followers and the emphasis on "views" and "scenes" were to continue long after Bartlett left Canada in 1841. They could be seen in the art work of the Canadian Illustrated News and Picturesque Canada in the 18705 and i88os, and could no doubt be interpreted as a major factor in the development of landscape as a recurrent interest among Canadian artists. William Bartlett was a working artist-illustrator. Unlike Turner, he was not a member of the Royal Academy, nor did he make his fortune. But because of his accepted and appreciated skills as an interpreter of foreign places for an English audience, he was able to work in a single field of expertise. This was in direct contrast to the immigrant artists and engravers who first tried to make a living in Canada. Like the majority of their English counterparts, many of these early artists practised a variety of skills. Charles Torbett, for example, working in Halifax between 1812 and 1830, advertised himself as an engraver of maps, bookplates, treasury notes and book illustrations; Samuel Tazewell, the "first lithographer in Upper Canada," working in Kingston in the 18205, was a watchmaker and jeweller as well as an engraver; James Smillie produced brochures, insurance certificates, and business cards as well as engraved prints; John Ellis specialized in maps and plans in Toronto in the 18405; and the artist-engravers working in Prince Edward Island in the 18505 advertised themselves as house painters, sign painters, and artists as well as engravers in marble and metal.9 For most of these men, life was too precarious financially to work solely in their chosen field. As James Smillie said before he left Quebec for the United States in 1831, "Whatever might be in store for Canada in the future in Fine Arts, it was too far off to suit my purpose."10 Yet it was with the pioneering efforts of such people as Torbett, Smillie, and Tazewell that the history of the commercial graphic arts in Canada really began. The small settlements in which the early engravers and lithographers tried to set up shop were either colonial garrison towns or entrepots for the staple trades of fish and fur.11 Before the mid-eighteenth century, the population of these settlements rarely exceeded 4,000. By the 17905, however, following the end

40 Art and Work

of the war with France and the establishment of British rule, commercial activity began to change the military atmosphere of such centres as Halifax and Quebec City, as well as the fur-trade character of Montreal.12 Further, in the first half of the nineteenth century, immigration from the British Isles and the United States led to the rapid growth of these early towns, including York (Toronto), prompting a need for supplies and services and thus starting the process of urbanization. For engravers and lithographers, a certain level of population was essential before they could begin to feel secure. They could not work unless a printer, or at least a printing press, was situated in a town, and this only occurred where a settlement was large enough to warrant a government-owned press or a printer, who would also be the publisher of a local newspaper or gazette.13 Some engravers did their own printing, as Charles Torbett appears to have done in Halifax in the iSios,14 and some, like James Smillie in the iSzos, sent their work out of the country to be printed.15 But once printers such as John Bushell in Halifax and Samuel Neilson in Quebec City had established print shops, artist-engravers and lithographers were able to reproduce and publish their work in Canada. In 1759 Richard Short, a topographical artist attached to the British garrison in Quebec City, visited Halifax. He sketched a view of the city that included John Bushell's print shop in the background, but the picture was not printed or engraved there; this was done in London in 1761, along with twelve views of Quebec.16 However, the first illustration to be published in Canada did come from the Bushell press. It was a view of Halifax harbour published in the Nova Scotia Calendar, or an Alamanack for 1776 by Anthony Henry.17 Henry, who had worked with Bushell since 1758, took over the print shop after Bushell's death in 1761. Like Bushell, he was the "king's printer" for the colony, producing mainly government gazettes and political broadsheets. This was not a satisfactory means of earning a living. The king's printers were poorly paid in all the colonies and were subject to considerable harassment from government officials.18 Nevertheless, from the time of Bushell, there was a steady succession of king's (or queen's) printers and a gradual increase in the number of independent printers working in all parts of colonial Canada. There was also a slow move away

4i Transferring the Traditions from government control and towards more innovative printing and publishing - the printers, more often than not, fulfilling both these functions. The first of these printers to introduce illustrations into printed material was Anthony Henry, with the illustration of Halifax in his almanack. It is not clear, however, who drew or engraved this illustration, or indeed if Henry did the work himself. As a result, credit for the first Canadian-produced illustrations has gone to John George Hochstetter of Quebec City.19 The beginning of printing in Quebec followed the same pattern of development as in Nova Scotia. Two American printers, William Brown and Thomas Gilmore of Philadelphia, established the first printing press in Quebec City in 1764. They started a provincial gazette, suffered the usual financial problems, and endured the customary governmental restrictions. But gradually, especially after Gilmore's death in 1773, William Brown built up a solid business. He was made king's printer, received the government printing contract, and at the same time began to publish religious books, advertising handbills, and annual almanacks.20 In 1789, following his death, the firm was inherited first by his nephew Samuel Neilson and then, in 1793, by another nephew, John Neilson. Originally from Scotland, the Neilsons continued the high standards set by Brown and succeeded in making their printing establishment one of the major printing firms in early Canada. Not only did they publish the Quebec Gazette and the Quebec Magazine,21 but they also produced almanacks and directories, and continued the publication of books in French, English, and Latin for use by church missionaries. John Neilson, who became a member of the Assembly of Lower Canada in 1818, transferred publication of the Gazette to a partnership between his son Samuel and William Cowan but continued as a book publisher.22 His printing firm became the pattern for similar workshops in nineteenthcentury Canada, his apprentices and journeymen being largely responsible for spreading the art of printing throughout Lower and Upper Canada. As Aegidius Fauteux noted in his brief history of Canadian printing records, Neilson's workshop became "the centre of printing in Canada for half a century."23 Neilson's was also the first printing firm to produce singlesheet illustrations in the same manner as English and European

42, Art and Work

publishers. These were issued either separately or as single sheets within a magazine. Hochstetter was one of the engravers employed by Samuel Neilson. In the first edition of the Quebec Magazine, published in 1792,, Hochstetter's View of Quebec from Point Levy was issued as a bonus with the magazine. Further works by Hochstetter appeared as frontispieces for the Quebec Magazine and the Quebec almanacks between 1792 and 1799. Most of these, Mary Allodi suggests, were probably copies of European work.24 The Falls of Montmorency, published in 1793, was, however, both drawn and engraved by Hochstetter and depicted a Canadian scene. It was engraved on copper and was worked in a rather crude attempt at the Picturesque style. It has to be one of the first engravings to emulate the work being done by the visiting English artists and engravers. Accounts of the early printers and engravers clearly illustrate the necessary interrelationship between them. In Montreal, for instance, although a press was established as early as 1776 by Fleury Mesplet,25 the production of engraved prints did not really begin until the 18305, with the productive collaboration between engraver William Leney and printer Adolphus Bourne.26 By this time there were many printers and engravers in the city, a factor that led to Montreal's becoming "the most active centre of pictorial printmaking."27 By contrast, in Upper Canada, in spite of the fact that Louis Roy (a Neilson-trained printer) had been engaged by Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe as king's printer in I793,28 the reproduction of images did not become a viable possibility until the 18305. As in Montreal, printing had by then become an accepted part of urban life. Print shops existed in more of the large towns and were able to undertake work not controlled by government. Nevertheless, individual accounts indicate how difficult it still was for trained engravers and lithographers if there was no printer or publisher able or willing to produce their work. There had to be an interest on the part of the printer to produce the images, and until the concept of an illustrated press became widespread later in the century, engravers and lithographers were hard put to make a living. The experiences of Charles Torbett, James Smillie, and Samuel Oliver Tazewell serve to demonstrate how individual craftsmen, or "art-workmen," were affected by a lack of support. Not only were they experts in a

43

Transferring the Traditions

field not yet understood, but they were subject to the political and economic uncertainties of government employment. There is no information on Charles Torbett's early years. It is not known, for example, whether he was British, American, or Canadian born, or where he received his training as an engraver. What seems fairly certain is that he was actively working in Halifax between 1812, and 1834 and was reasonably successful for the time.29 In his brief study of early Nova Scotian engravers, George MacLaren describes Torbett as a "most prolific" engraver,30 and it is clear from an extant illustrated membership certificate of the English Benevolent Society produced by Torbett in 1819 that he was indeed a highly skilled copperplate engraver. Also evident in this example of his work is the influence of the English Picturesque style. What is obvious from the MacLaren study, however, is that Torbett could not earn a living engraving "views" for single-sheet prints. Not only was he described as an "engraver of maps, bookplates, treasury notes, book illustrations," but he was also a silversmith. He designed and engraved pieces of silverware, including a presentation cup that was described in 1823 as being "unrivaled in this province" for "beauty and taste."31 In 1822. Torbett drew, engraved, and published a portrait of Edmund Burke, the bishop and vicar apostolic of Nova Scotia. As there was no printer named, and as Torbett was often described as a "copper-plate printer," it seems likely that he also printed his own engravings. He engraved landscapes and portraits for publication in the Acadian Magazine between 182.6 and 1827, and provided illustrations for Thomas Haliburton's Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (i82.9). 32 In spite of this seemingly steady activity, no more is heard of Torbett after 1834. According to J. Russell Harper, he "possibly" moved to Boston, where an engraver of the same name worked between 1836 and 1842. Torbett obviously tried hard, but in spite of turning his hand to a wide variety of engraving skills, he was eventually forced to leave Nova Scotia. Part of the difficulty was that the early presses were generally unsuitable for fine pictorial printing, and there were few artists resident in the colonial towns who were capable of providing drawings for professional engravers. The situation was somewhat better in Quebec City with the arrival of Lord Dalhousie

44 Art and Work

as governor-in-chief of British North America in 1819. Among Dalhousie's staff were a number of army officers who were extremely capable artists. One of the most distinguished was John Elliot Woolford, who after a brief visit to Halifax, drew, engraved, printed, and published four views of that city in i8i9- 33 Although Woolford advertised this set of engravings for sale and was obviously interested in having his work more widely distributed, he was not a professional engraver and did not have to make a living as either an artist or an engraver. The situation was very different for James Smillie. Although Smillie was assisted and befriended by such officer-artists as Woolford, James Pattison Cockburn, and John Crawford Young, he suffered considerable economic difficulty during the nine years he spent in Canada.34 James Smillie came from Scotland with his family in 1821. He was only thirteen years old but had already spent periods of apprenticeship with a silver engraver and a picture engraver. His father, David Smillie, was a jeweller who hoped to start his own business on his arrival in Quebec. David's brother (James Sr) had already established himself as a goldsmith and engraver of seals and stones.35 Unfortunately, injury and illness prevented David Smillie from practising his trade until the following year, a factor which placed the Smillie family fortunes in a perpetual state of uncertainty. James and his brother (David Jr) joined the family business in 1823, David as a jeweller and James as an engraver. Work in the shop centred around the engraving of crests and other "ornaments" for members of the military stationed in the town, and engraving "spoons, door-plates, dog collars &c now and then a plate card." While respecting the need for work of any sort, Smillie noted that "all these things interfered with the proper application to my legitimate branch."36 When he did engrave a pictorial plate, the sum he received was so small as to make the project a loss rather than a gain. Yet it was his association with the military that prompted Smillie to continue with pictorial engraving. Not only did the officer-artists encourage him to reproduce their water-colours and sketches, but in 182,7 they helped him obtain a further period of apprenticeship in Scotland.37 Unfortunately, this did not lead to any great demand for his work on his return in 1828.

45

Transferring the Traditions

Instead, he went into business with his brother David under the name of D. and J. Smillie. They advertised themselves as "jewellers and engravers," noting that they were prepared to produce silver and brass crests "to any pattern."38 In spite of the amount of engraving required for the everyday work of silver, bookplates, and trade-cards, Smillie also produced sixteen single-sheet prints, twenty-two book illustrations, and six maps during his time in Quebec. According to Allodi, this was more than all the single-sheet pictorial prints produced in the whole of the rest of British North America in the same period.39 At no time, however, did James Smillie make a satisfactory living. With the exception of Picture of Quebec, the first illustrated guide to Quebec City, his prints did not sell and he frequently failed to complete work.40 Picture of Quebec, a project instigated by the Rev. George Bourne and financed by 1,500 prepaid subscribers, was probably successful because Smillie had the work printed in New York. He had felt for some time that there was no one in Quebec whose press was capable of printing pictorial work. His own wooden press, which he described as "bulky" and "warped," was quite inadequate for fine reproduction. But with reasonable financial security and the assistance of George Bourne's son, who lived in New York, Picture of Quebec was printed to Smillie's satisfaction. The guidebook, with plates by Smillie and text by George Bourne, was published in 182.9 and was well received by its subscribers. It was not a financial success, however, no doubt because the subscribers had paid only one dollar each and there were no further printings. Smillie found that "after all the debts connected with the publication were paid, the amount in our pockets [was] very trifling."41 James Smillie had had great hopes for Picture of Quebec, but it made little difference. He was forced, as he said, "back into the old rut with no prospect of anything better ahead." He returned to "doing everything and anything."42 But the visit to New York had opened his eyes to wider possibilities, and he became increasingly aware of the opportunities when George Bourne's son asked him to engrave some views of New York similar to those made for Picture of Quebec. In 1830 Smillie decided to move to New York, and by the following year was sufficiently well established to send for his mother, his sisters,

46 Art and Work

and his younger brother. He subsequently became one of America's most respected engravers.43 It is possible that if James Smillie had resided in Quebec twenty years later, his skills would have been appreciated. By then there would have been a much larger community, and the other elements necessary for supporting professional reproductive art work would have been in place. Certainly, by 1850 there were presses in print shops that were suitable for pictorial printmaking, and there were engravers and printers who realized that, to succeed, one also needed to have an understanding of business. The small population of Quebec, the dependence on the military and on the government for art work and commissions, and the lack of a suitable press combined with Smillie's lack of business expertise to deny him a living. The same difficulties presumably affected artists in the other towns of colonial Canada.44 The experiences of Samuel Tazewell, an engraver and jeweller who settled in Kingston in the iSzos and attempted to become the "first lithographer of Upper Canada," exemplified their frustrations. The art of lithography, or the transferring to paper of images drawn on stone, using water-resistant media, offered certain advantages to the early pictorial printmakers. Because lithography was a form of surface printing, artists or lithographicprinters could draw directly onto the stone, thereby eliminating the need for an intermediary (as with engraving) to copy the image. It was also possible to draw an image on treated paper and apply that to the stone, a process that removed the need for reversing the image and so made it possible to reproduce handwriting.45 By the iSios, government lithographic presses existed in Quebec and New Brunswick for official purposes. Robert Shore Milnes Bouchette, for example, used lithographic reproduction for his sketches to accompany the Statistical Report of 1828 for Lord Dalhousie. The report was prepared by his father, the surveyor-general Joseph Bouchette, and was printed on the lithographic press of the Royal Engineers at Quebec.46 Working for government was not always so straightforward, however. Samuel Oliver Tazewell was a skilled watchmaker, jeweller, and engraver when he came to Canada from England in the 182,08. He opened his own jewellery business in 1829 in Kingston and appears to have been well thought of as a silver

47 Transferring the Traditions

engraver.47 Recognizing that there was a future in lithographic printing, he succeeded in gaining the support of Hugh Thomson, the editor of the Upper Canada Herald, though Thomson, like many others, demonstrated the general lack of understanding of the new reproductive processes. In an announcement of the forthcoming examples of Tazewell's work to appear in his paper, he apologized for their delay, noting that he had not realized that it was necessary to have a new and "peculiar press" for the art of lithography.48 Tazewell found it extremely difficult to find suitable stones, and more than a year passed before he had a working lithographic press. Finally, in August 1831, he felt confident enough to present Sir John Colborne, the lieutenant-governor, with samples of his work and to advertise in the Kingston Chronicle. His advertisement noted that he had established a lithographic press in Kingston and that his firm could execute "all kinds of work ... Maps, Plans, Views, Circulars, Music, Headings of Merchant Bills and Steam Boat Notices, with the sketch of the Boat if required, Blank Deeds and Memorials."49 His first images included cartoons and views for a pamphlet, Notices of the Rideau Canal, which was published by the Patriot in i832,.50 His plan to produce a "lithographic plan of the Town of Kingston" in 1831 was delayed because he needed to replace a broken stone. This led to his discovery of a local limestone suitable for his press - and to his hope that he had found a quick and cheap system of reproduction. When the map finally appeared in January 1832,, it seemed to offer success and security for Tazewell as a producer of maps for the government. Samuel Proudfoot Hurd, the newly appointed surveyor-general of Upper Canada, was anxious to have a lithographer in his employ. He recognized the value of producing cheap maps for immigrant settlers and let it be known that he would be interested in having Tazewell join the surveyor-general's office.51 In late 1832, on the strength of what appears to have been extremely vague intimations of an official position, Tazewell moved his family and his press to York (Toronto). He established his business as the York Press and awaited government instructions to print maps for the surveyor-general. Unfortunately, Tazewell found himself caught in the middle of a power struggle between the various factions of government in a dispute over

48

Art and Work

who should be responsible for lithographing and printing government material. Not only had Hurd antagonized Sir John Colborne, but he had also offended William Chewitt, the senior surveyor prior to his arrival.52 The result was that Tazewell was not offered an official appointment and was rarely paid on time for the work that he was given to do. A draughtsman who, according to Tazewell, knew nothing about the art of lithography was eventually employed to work the government press. The production of the maps was subsequently halted. This delay in producing maps cheaply and quickly had a logical explanation in Tazewell's view: the repeated reproduction of maps drawn once on the lithography stone would remove the need for individually hand-drawn maps and plans by members of the surveyor's office, and would thus lead to the loss of fees and "perquisites."53 Tazewell put up with the situation in York until 1835, when he moved his family to St Catharines and returned to the more reliable pursuits of jewellery production and watchmaking. While in York, however, he did manage to produce some independent work. He provided illustrations for the Canadian Literary Magazine in 1833 and for Richard Henry Bonnycastle's articles on North American geology, published in the American Journal of Science and Arts of 1836. Between 1832. and 1833, he produced a set of views of Canadian waterfalls, and in 1834 he exhibited a view of Niagara Falls and "Six Lithographs on Canadian Stone" with the Society of Artists and Amateurs of Toronto.54 He was obviously a man of skill and ingenuity, but like Torbett and Smillie he was caught up in a period of transition. The value of reproducing images quickly and cheaply was not yet appreciated by those in power, and the reproduction processes themselves were still time-consuming and inconsistent. The creation of the other ingredients necessary for the establishment of the commercial reproduction of images was, however, underway. During the twenty years between James Smillie's failure to establish a successful lithography business in Canada and midcentury, the development of a suitable milieu for the rise of an illustrated popular press took place. It followed a certain pattern, which was seen first in the major cities of Montreal and Toronto and was then echoed in smaller cities as industrialization and

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Transferring the Traditions

urbanization gradually spread into all areas of Canada. A number of factors were involved: a steadily increasing population, with its need for services and supplies and with a growing interest in education and literacy; the mechanical manufacture of paper; the introduction of steam-driven cylinder printing presses; expanding transport and telecommunication facilities; and a rising business class that was aware of the commercial value of advertising. The combination of these factors had, by the late i86os, made a number of Canadian cities ripe for the introduction of a graphic arts industry. The population increase had been dramatic. When York was incorporated as the city of Toronto in 1834, it had only 9,200 inhabitants, but by 1851 it had a population of over 30,000, and by 1871 it was a thriving commercial and industrial centre of ii5,ooo.55 Montreal's population increased from around 20,000 in 1821 to 57,700 by 1851 and to 144,000 by i87i. 56 Other essential elements can also be considered in relation to Toronto and Montreal. The major railway construction of the 18405 and 18505 turned both cities into the metropolitan centres of interconnected railway systems. With the opening of the St Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad, Montreal obtained a link with Portland, Maine, thereby gaining access to an Atlantic port, while the Great Western Railway joined Canadian lines to Buffalo and New York. With completion of the Grand Trunk Railway and the extension of telegraphic communication, which had been growing steadily since the i84os,57 Montreal and Toronto found themselves in a position to accelerate their commercial and industrial development. Moreover, Canada's industrial revolution was sufficiently advanced by the 18408 to provide the elements needed for the popular press to "take off."58 For example, during the 18305, newsprint, which had previously been imported from England, was being manufactured by the mills of John Taylor, or by those of John Eastwood and Colin Skinner, using the water-power of the Don River.59 Hand presses, usually imported from the United States, were, by 1836, being manufactured in Toronto.60 In 1840 William Cunnabell of Halifax became the first printer to apply steam to his Washington press,61 and in 1844 George Brown, founder of the Globe newspaper, imported the first cylinder press into Canada. It was a Hoe rotary press, newly invented in

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