Victorian Illustration on Christmas Cards

Yesterday I made another batch of Christmas cards, and once again, a significant number of them were copied from original Victorian engravings and illustrations.

I just really love that style of illustration, from the engravings of William Hogarth in the middle of the 18^th century, then the savagely biting political cartoons of men like James Gillray, which begat the social conscience driven work of men like George Cruikshank, Hablot Knight Brown (Phiz) and John Leach in the first half of the 19^th century, which in turn begat the more satirical work of artists like Sir John Tenniel, primarily in Punch magazine.

I’d already fallen under the spell of Hogarth and Gillray long before I discovered that I have a family connection to Hogarth himself, and to Gillray’s generation of cartoonists. In the early noughties when I was researching my family history, I discovered that one of my 5x great grandfathers was an artist called Philip Dawe. He may have been a pupil of Hogarth – he certainly worked for him at one time. Philip made a crust from engraving other people’s paintings, from publishing prints, and also from tutoring promising young artists, including George Morland. He was also a political cartoonist, although as his cartoon “The Bostonians in Distress” here shows, he was, in my opinion, competent but uninspired.

I’ll try to illustrate what I like so much about Victorian illustration with some of the cards I’ve sketched this year and in the last few years.

This one shows a cook steaming the Christmas Pudding. Christmas pudding is one of the stock subjects that Victorian illustrators would return to throughout the century, although more often to the bringing in or the serving of the pudding like this one.

The first illustration shows one of the things that I love, the way a Victorian illustrator could suggest a whole background interior with just a few well paced lines, and with careful use of hatching and cross hatching. I think that artists like the man who made the original of this one were also great storytellers too.

This one of this year’s batch is copied from an illustration made right at the end of the Victorian era, in 1900, but it illustrates my point about storytelling here – with the cheeky chappy beckoning the young lady, all the while hiding the mistletoe behind his back. Victorian illustration, when it’s not being satirical in the pages of Punch and the like, can be very sentimental, but that’s another reason why I think they make great Christmas cards – because Christmas is a time of year when being sentimental just fits.

I also really like the rather different ways that Father Christmas/Santa Claus is portrayed. In the cards I’ve made over the last few years, I’ve largely followed two distinctly different traditions, the British and the American. In Victorian times, British illustrators tended to depict Father Christmas as a very traditional figure, a hearty – although not noticeably fat - old man with long flowing white beard, a long robe, crowned with holly, often holding a Christmas tree, and spreading good cheer in the form of food and drink, rather than delivering toys to children. I’ve made a few cards in this tradition this year.

I haven’t made any based on the Victorian American Santa this year, but I’ve copied a lot of the work of the great cartoonist and illustrator Thomas Nast in the past.

As you can see from the cards I’ve posted here, his Santa is a fat, twinkly rogue – not quite in the full coca cola Santa Claus garb yet, but delivering presents for all. I think that Nast's inspiration was the description of Santa Claus in Clement Clark Moore's famous poem "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" ('Twas the night before Christmas etc.) 

Another Christmas subject that Victorian illustrators liked was carol singers. These two from last year demonstrate a couple of different ways that they explored this idea.

You can see from this first one the artist's social conscience is very much at work, with this rather ragged family deriving some little cheer from carolling in the open in the run down area where they live, hoping to make a few bob, enough to be able to eat on Christmas Day. Well, that’s the meaning I bring to it when I look at it, and it’s a testament to the skill of the original that sitting here, getting on for the best part of 2 centuries later, and I can read that into it.

One of the other things to note about Victorian Christmas illustrations is the wistful harking back to days gone by. This design, showing cheerful folk dragging a yule log up to the big house – in return for which they would presumably be received with a pat on the head, a mince pie, and a glass of the cheap stuff from the Lord of the Manor. The most famous Victorian Christmas story, Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” pulls this same trick. It may be set in contemporary London of the late 1840s, but it’s wrung from Dickens’ own longing for the Christmas of his childhood some twenty five years earlier.