Exhibit:

Little Magazine Gallery

Preview of images

This gallery shows something of the range of art featured in the little magazines of the fin de siècle. The most famous magazine art was Aubrey Beardsley's pen-and-ink work, which he designed specifically for reproduction by line-block engraving, a photomechanical process. These art-nouveau designs, featuring the bold use of line and negative/positive space, gave their signature to the period, along with the posters  and commercial art that they inspired and were inspired by. Some magazine artwork took the form of limited edition original prints--that is, etchings, lithographs, and wood engravings designed and produced by manual means over which the artist had control.  Most, but by no means all, of these were reproduced in black and white. Some magazine artwork was reproduced in halftone (grayscale) using photomechanical processes to resize and recolour large original paintings. The principal reproductions firms serving little magazines include C. Hare,  Hentschel, Naumann, Swan, andWalker and Boutall. The little magazine editors tended to be scrupulous about acknowledging the form(s) of reproduction used in each issue. 

Images in this Exhibit

“La Lune d'Été” By Andrew Kay Womrath

“La Lune d'Été” (The Summer Moon) is an illustration by Andrew Kay Womrath who was an American artist born in Philadelphia in 1869. Womrath’s oeuvre include works in woodcut, drawing and watercolour. “La Lune d'Été” was originally one of two illustrations that Womrath contributed to The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal which was a Celtic revical edited by William Sharp and published by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues between the...
Illustration to The Great Worm by Charles Ricketts

“Illustration to The Great Worm” is designed by Charles Ricketts (editor of The Dial along with Charles Shannon) and executed by M. and N. Hanhart. It is an original print made using lithography. It appears as the front piece to the first issue of The Dial published in August 1889. The image acts as an illustration to the fairy tale “The Great Worm” by John Gray, which...