Illustrating Camelot

Arthurian Studies

by Barbara Tepa Lupack, Alan Lupack

Arthurian book illustration, which came into its own in the Arthurian Revival of the nineteenth century and began to flourish as an important art form, has done more than any other visual art to shape notions of King Arthur and his court and to introduce the legends to the widest possible audience. Yet to date there has been no comprehensive study of Arthurian illustration. Illustrating Camelot fills this critical gap, by examining the special collaboration between illustrators and authors and exploring the ways that the best Arthurian illustrators move beyond mere reproduction to become interpretive readers of the texts they embellish. In versions that range from illustrated editions of Tennyson's Idylls of the King to the numerous editions and popular children's retellings of Malory's Morte d'Arthur and in forms that range from Julia Margaret Cameron's landmark photographic portraitsto Russell Flint's lush watercolours, from Gustave Doré's Gothic-styled engravings to Howard Pyle's American-inspired drawings, these illustrators - as this pioneering volume demonstrates - not only reinterpret the timeless talesbut also reflect the values of their age. Richly illustrated with both colour and black and white plates, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the stories of King Arthur and the world of Camelot.

BARBARA TEPA LUPACK is former Academic Dean at SUNY and Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Poland and France.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Gustave Doré
Julia Margaret Cameron
Dan Beard
Aubrey Beardsley
Jessie M. King
Sir W. Russell Flint
Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale
Walter Crane
Arthur Rackham
Lancelot Speed
Howard Pyle
Hudson Talbott
Anna-Marie Ferguson
Bibliography
Index

Genres: Nonfiction, Arthurian, Art

296 pages, Hardcover

First published October 16, 2008

About the author

Barbara Tepa Lupack is former academic dean and professor of English at SUNY/ESC in Rochester, New York.

Reviews

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite never having been entranced by Arthurian legend myself, I greatly enjoyed this volume on how artists over the past few centuries have envisioned Camelot. Though I've tried Tennyson, White, Lerner, Malory, and more--even the TV show Merlin--Camelot has not been for me, though I do have a weakness for Elaine, but that's really because of Anne of Green Gables.



Each chapter considers the illustrator's contribution to Camelot imagery, carefully setting them within their artistic contexts and legacies. The illlustrators who published in black and white have an edge in Illustrating Camelot because Lupack can reproduce more of their work here, while the color artists must share too few pages of reproduction. It was interesting to see artists from the late 20th and early 21st centuries here alongside the old standards.

Recommended to anyone hoping to learn more about how Camelot has been pictured over time.

List of illustrators:
Gustave Doré
Julia Margaret Cameron
Dan Beard
Aubrey Beardsley
Jessie M. King
Sir William Russell Flint
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
Walter Crane
Arthur Rackham
Lancelot Speed
Howard Pyle
Hudson Talbott
Anna-Marie Ferguson

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

As befits a study on Arthurian book illustrations, Illustrating Camelot has a generous helping of examples of the genre – forty in monochrome and thirty-two in colour. If a picture is worth a thousand words then we have a text automatically augmented by 72,000 words!

And what a text it is. Using thirteen named illustrators as her framework, Barbara Tepa Lupack takes us through two centuries and more of imaging the court of Arthur, commenting on the politics, mores and personalities of the times and their inter-relationship with the depiction of the Arthurian ideal.

The casual reader may well be familiar with a number of the main illustrators who provide the chapter headings – Gustav Doré, Aubrey Beadsley, Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham and Howard Pyle – but may raise a quizzical eyebrow at others such as Dan Beard, Sir William Russell Flint and Hudson Talbott. For the record, Dan Beard is well known to North American readers for his illustrations to Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Flint’s “theatrical” watercolours for Malory influenced many a lesser artist, and Talbott reveals an indebtedness to the visual arts of the late 20th century, especially comic books. The final chapter discusses Anna-Marie Ferguson, best-known as the first ever female illustrator of the Morte Darthur.

There is a lot of pleasure to be had in the reading of this, an obvious labour of love for the author, whose enthusiasm for her subject is as infectious as her wide research is impressive. Every page has something to stimulate the imagination: at random I find that the publication of illustrated Arthurian books between 1890 and 1910 was three times that of the previous five decades (166), that Beardsley “discomforted viewers ... by defamiliarizing familiar objects” (80), and that Howard Pyle’s illustrated Arthurian books were not only a model for behaving but for “Americanizing, or at least democratizing, the medieval legends”.

While disappointed that there is no mention of Lotte Reiniger, whose pseudo-woodcuts so graced the Penguin edition of Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, this reader is grateful for the opportunity to delight in old favourites (like Rackham), be introduced to unfamiliar artists (like Lancelot Speed, who must be a prime example of what New Scientist calls “nominative determinism”) and to place all the artists in their cultural and historical context.

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[Morgiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are no doubt many volumes about Arthurian art in general, but the Lupacks are probably the first to focus solely on book illustration. This book covers the major 19th, 20th, and 21st century artists who illustrated Arthurian books, usually the classics like Idylls of the King or Morte d'Arthur. Biographical information is given about each artist, and in the case of the 21st century ones, much of the source material is interviews or communication with the artist. Sometimes the Lupacks go off topic, particularly at the end of each chapter, discussing other artists who were influenced by the one in question, which is somewhat annoying when they had nothing to do with Arthurian art, but does provide greater exposition of artistic movements and such. My primary complaint with this book is the size of the font, which is very small and may be challenging for some readers.