Henry Justice Ford: Master Illustrator of Fairy Tale and Myth

Illustrated in colour and black & white

Henry Justice Ford (1860-1941) was one of the prolific late Victorian and Edwardian illustrators at a time when book illustration was perhaps at its peak. As a painter he exhibited landscapes, portraits and historical subjects in number of major galleries, but it is as a master illustrator of fairy tale and myth, histories and romances that he is best remembered. A follower of the Pre-Raphaelites particularly Walter Crane and Edward Burne-Jones, he forged his own distinctive style of romantic fantasy.

His best known work was for the folk and fairy story collectors Andrew & Nora Lang whose lavishly illustrated stories (437 in total) were admired by many later authors including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Margaret Atwood.

His paintings can be viewed in the Ulster Museum, Swanage Town Hall, Bushey Museum & Art Gallery and the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth.

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Illustrating Jules Verne

Edited by Quentin Russell

Illustrated in colour and black & white

Jules Verne is often regarded as the ‘Father of Science Fiction’ or at least as its first modern exponent, but this was only a proportion of his prodigious output. He wrote more than 60 books, most memorably the 54 novels comprising the Voyages Extraordinaires (Extraordinary Voyages), including his classics 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon in which he expressed his fascination with science, technological advance, exploration and travel. Such books offered great scope for the illustrators who were commissioned to help bring the tales to life for an audience that at that time was not highly literate.

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The series used over 4,000 illustrations, averaging at 60 per novel and one for every six to eight pages of text. These engraved images were important in not only giving substance to the characters but in helping to conjure up the exoticism of far away places and the wonder and dread inspired by Verne’s imagined future based on scientific progress. The illustrations were often used for descriptive purposes, rather than as part of the narrative, or as a foretaste of events about to unfold on the following pages, taking the reader imaginatively beyond words evoking a sense of realism while at the same time entering a dream world.

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As a writer of highly imaginative fantasy and adventure, Jules Verne was blessed to be writing at a time when book illustration was reaching its peak. The wealth of experience and talent of his illustrators, who were able to conjure up his worlds before the readers’ eyes, contributed immensely to the success of the Voyages Extraordinaires. A characteristic they all shared was the ability to produce striking content that created visually driven novels with an exciting dynamic between text and image.