Francis Douce was a British antiquary and museum curator.
Howard Pyle was an American illustrator, painter, and author, primarily of books for young people. He was a native of Wilmington, Delaware, and he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy.
James Granger (1723–1776) was an English clergyman, biographer, and print collector. He is now known as the author of the Biographical History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution (1769). Granger was an early advocate of animal rights.
Kinuko Yamabe Craft is a Japanese-born American painter, illustrator and fantasy artist.
Andrew White Tuer (1838–1900) was a British publisher, writer and printer.
Cyril Walter Hodges was an English artist and writer best known for illustrating children's books and for helping to recreate Elizabethan theatre. He won the annual Greenaway Medal for British children's book illustration in 1964.
Winifred Shirley Hughes was an English author and illustrator. She wrote more than fifty books, which have sold more than 11.5 million copies, and illustrated more than two hundred.
Isaac Cruikshank was a Scottish painter and caricaturist, known for his social and political satire.
The illustration of manuscript books was well established in ancient times, and the tradition of the illuminated manuscript thrived in the West until the invention of printing. Other parts of the world had comparable traditions, such as the Persian miniature. Modern book illustration comes from the 15th-century woodcut illustrations that were fairly rapidly included in early printed books, and later block books. Other techniques such as engraving, etching, lithography and various kinds of colour printing were to expand the possibilities and were exploited by such masters as Daumier, Doré or Gavarni.
John Wykeham Archer was a British artist, engraver and writer.
Thomas Hearne was an English landscape painter, engraver and illustrator. Hearne's watercolours were typified by applying a wash of subtle subdued colours over a clear outline in fine brush, pen or pencil. His techniques were studied by younger artists such as Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner.
Hugh Thomson was an Irish Illustrator born at Coleraine near Derry. He is best known for his pen-and-ink illustrations of works by authors such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and J. M. Barrie. Thomson inaugurated the Cranford School of illustration with the publication of the 1891 Macmillan reissue of Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford.
Mary Ellen Edwards, also known as MEE, was a British artist and illustrator. She contributed to many newspapers, periodicals and children's books.
Anthony Morris Storer (1746–1799) was an English man of fashion, politician and collector.
Thomas Balston was a director of the publishers Duckworth and Co., and a noted scholar of English book production and illustration. He was also an amateur painter, having studied under Mark Gertler.
"The Lamentable and Tragical History of Titus Andronicus,"also called"Titus Andronicus' Complaint," is a ballad from the 17th century about the fictional Roman general, Titus, and his revenge cycle with the Queen of the Goths. Events in the ballad take place near the end of the Roman Empire, and the narrative of the ballad parallels the plot of William Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus. Scholarly debate exists as to which text may have existed first, the ballad or the play. The ballad itself was first entered on the Stationers' Register in 1594, the same year the play was entered. Surviving copies of the ballad can be found in the British Library, in the Huntington Library, and at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Online copies of the facsimiles are also available for public consumption at sites such as the English Broadside Ballad Archive.
Dr. Lucy Peltz is Head of Collection Displays and Senior Curator 18th Century Collections at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Richard Bull (1721–1805) was an English landowner and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1756 to 1780. He was a noted art collector who lived in a historic house on the Isle of Wight.
Louis Émile Benassit was a French artist and raconteur. He cut a colorful figure in the literary and artistic circles of Paris in the 1860s and 1870s, known equally for his satirical drawings and for his barbed wit. His updated versions of the fables of La Fontaine were widely reported in the French press. After his own military service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he frequently depicted soldiers, often enduring snow or inclement weather. Eventually, thanks in part to the influential art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, his work began to fetch high prices; Benassit's depictions of courtiers and ladies of the 1700s became especially popular. But beginning in 1882, a progressive paralysis that started in his right arm cut short both his career and his appearances in café society, though by at least one account he learned to paint using his left hand. The last twelve years of his life were spent in relative seclusion away from Paris.
Pinckney Marcius-Simons was a New York-born artist who spent his youth in Spain, Italy, and France. He studied painting under Jehan Georges Vibert, eventually joining the painter’s household. Continuing to reside in France, he exhibited at the Paris Salon at an early age and quickly established himself as a successful genre painter. In the 1890s, he radically changed his subject matter and technique. Sometimes classified as Symbolist, his phantasmagoric later works depicted Christian religious visions, elements of Classical mythology, and scenes inspired by the operas of Richard Wagner. His works were greatly admired by Teddy Roosevelt, who owned four paintings by Maricus-Simons and called him "a great imaginative artist, a wonderful colorist; and a man with a vision more wonderful still." In 1908 he was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Described from the beginning of his career as "delicate in health," he died in his forties in Bayreuth, where he was buried. In his lifetime his works fiercely divided critics and were avidly sought by collectors, but after his death he was largely forgotten.
