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Engraved Title-page
George Cruikshank
1844
Wood-engraving
20.6 cm high by 13.1 cm wide, framed
Engraved title-page for William Harrison Ainsworth's Windsor Castle. A Historical Romance. First issued by Henry Colburn in 1844; re-issued by George Routledge in 1880.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Left: Daniel Maclise's Portrait of William Harrison Ainsworth for the 1844 Henry Colburn edition of Windsor Castle. An Historical Romance. Right: The 1839 frontispiece for the William Bentley triple-decker of Jack Sheppard by William Greatbach. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Although Cruikshank took over from Tony Johannot after just four instalments, the senior illustrator's name appears above that of his French junior, with the name of the principal designer of the book's program of illustration in much smaller print, suggesting that engraver and designer W. A. Delamotte was a relative unknown. The elegant, over-sized design features four monumental putti, medallions of Henry VIII and the Earl of Surrey, the Fair Geraldine (Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, with whom Surrey is in love) and Anne Boleyn, with vignettes of Windsor Castle above and below. The natural-looking young women at the bottom are likely intended to be the beautiful Mabel Lyndwood (Wyat's love-interest; actually Cardinal Wolsey's illegitimate daughter) and Geraldine. The whole design is suggestive of the sculptural elaboration on an Italian Renaissance tomb, with over-sized royal armour at the foot implying that this book serves as Ainsworth's monument to the war-like Henry and Thomas Wyat.
William Alfred Delamotte (born in Weymouth in 1775; died in Oxford in1863), the son of a French refugee,won early recognition as a draughtsman of great technical precision. For his remarkable drawings he received the patronage of no less a visitor to the Dorset seaport than His Majesty, King George III. At the age of eighteen he exhibited several paintings at the Royal Academy in London, and then the next year registered at the Royal Academy Schools. Altghough he studied here under one of the greatest historical painters of the age, Benjamin West, another of the King's protégés and President of the Royal Academy, Delamotte preferred doing architectural studies and landscapes, the two chief types of wood-engravings among his illustrations for this Ainsworth novel. After his studies at the Academy, he moved to Oxford, where he enjoyed sketching its stately colleges and churches. In 1803 he accepted the post of drawing-master at the newly established Royal Military College at Sandhurst, a position that he held for forty years. Just towards the end of his employment there, aged 58, he accepted the Ainsworth commission to provide the kinds of wood-engravings that Cruikshank had provided for The Tower of London in 1840. Here he deployed his considerable skill as a sketch-artist, wood-engraver, print-maker and lithographer, designing a hundred plates generally dropped right into the letterpress.
Antoine Johannot, commonly known as Tony Johannot (1803-52), was of French Hugenot stock. The Protestant family had settled in Offenbach am Main after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had guaratanteed freedom of worship for the French Protestant sect. Johannot was a painter turned lithographer, having learned the art of engraving from his brothers Alfred and Charles. He collaborated with Alfred on the illustrations for the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott. Although he initially preferred wood engraving, in the mid-1840s he resumed etching. He may have come to Ainsworth's attention through his book illustrations or through his exhibiting historical canvasses at the Paris Salon from 1831 onward. The impressionist style that Johannot employed in the first four illustrations for Windsor Castle. An Historical Romance were not at all like the detailed and vigorous steel-engravings of Ainsworth's former illustrator, George Cruikshank, which were evidently more to the novelist's taste. Robert L. Patten, indeed, is probably correct about Ainsworth's cool reaction to Johannot's "rather vaguely delineated" scenes (II: 173) that failed to provide the kind of dramatic tension he required to complement his prose and the tranquil nature studies and elegant architectural sketches of W. Alfred Delamotte.
Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. A Romance. With 28 illustrations by George Cruikshank. In three volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1839.
Ainsworth, William Harrison. Windsor Castle. An Historical Romance. Illustrated by George Cruikshank and Tony Johannot. With designs on wood by W. Alfred Delamotte. London: Routledge, 1880. Based on the Henry Colburn edition of 1844.
Patten, Robert L. Chapter 30, "The 'Hoc' Goes Down." George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art, vol. 2: 1835-1878. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers U. P., 1991; London: The Lutterworth Press, 1996. Pp. 153-186.
Last modified 26 November 2017