PANORAMA 1842-1865

A well-reproduced selection of wood block engravings from the London Illustrated News with accompanying contemporary news stories, tastefully edited. Earnestly digging away at wood blocks steadied by sandbags, the engraver and/or artist, making use of sketches, ""fertile imagination,"" and later, photographs, covered the main events of the day. Certainly the first British newspaper to use illustrations in quantity, the News combined a dramatic-to-sensational presentation with a sophistication of technique and often style. Some illustrations presage a very modern use of white space and rapid line; the crowd scenes have a photographic immediacy. Capricious artists, following the galas and domesticities of the Royal Family, would on one occasion plump the Queen down amid a Pinafore chorus; on others, eclipse her in an enraptured limning of festival food or splendid horses. Versions of riots and war, public events and pleasures, misery and massacres, seas and ships (all commented upon in news stories with a cautious, faintly liberal bias) reflect the newsroom excitement that pressured their creation. Immensely useful for the student of the period and the expository style now undergoing an upper-camp revival.