Illustration

About

Illustration is art made to accompany or interpret a text or idea for publication in books, magazines, advertisements, posters and scientific works. Because it was designed to be reproduced, it is shaped by printing processes, from wood engraving to lithography and photomechanical colour.

Illustrated books and periodicals boomed in the 19th century. Gustave Doré's engravings for Dante's Inferno (1861) fixed how many readers pictured hell, and Aubrey Beardsley's black-and-white drawings for Oscar Wilde's Salome (1894) set a standard for sinuous Art Nouveau line. In America, Howard Pyle's pupils included N. C. Wyeth, who painted adventure scenes for Treasure Island (1911), and J. C. Leyendecker's magazine covers defined an elegant masculine ideal. Natural history plates like John James Audubon's The Birds of America (1827–38) sit on the border between information and art, a line Walton Ford revisits in large watercolours. Dr. Seuss gave children's books a graphic language of their own.