An Illustrator of the Sixties

Extract

It is, we believe, uncontested, though a ‘fact not generally known,’ that English illustration attained a splendour in the sixties never equalled before or since. The fifties gave little promise of such a dazzling display, and there was already a perceptible declension in the seventies. One is sure to overlook some names if one tries to enumerate great illustrators of the sixties, but here is a sample sheaf: Millais, Tenniel, Keene, Leighton, Poynter, Du Maurier, Pettie, Pinwell, F. Sandys, A. B. Houghton, Fred Walker, J. D. Watson, Arthur Hughes. Volumes of Good Words, the Cornhill, and Once a Week lie dusty and forlorn in the ‘Threepenny Box,’ although they contain illustrations that the discerning eye could contemplate long and lovingly.

But in the decade of which we are speaking, it was common opinion in the artist-world of London that a young man had already produced such admirable work and was giving such promise of still better, that he seemed certain to make a great name for himself. So ‘man proposes.’ But Deo aliter visum. Matthew James Lawless was born in 1837. In 1864 he was lying in his grave in St. Mary’s, Kensal Green. He died in Pembridge Crescent, Bayswater.