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Gustave Doré’s Ancient Mariner

A final Coleridge post, also the oldest illustrated edition featured this week. Gustave Doré’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was first published in 1870, and the poet’s sombre, doom-laden tale was more suited to Doré’s Gothic proclivities than many of the lighter books he illustrated. Despite their age, these engravings have proved memorable enough to keep turning up whenever an illustration of the poem is required. The ship among the icebergs above is close enough to a scene in the third Pirates of the Caribbean film to have maybe been an influence, while the ice-bound section of the poem inspired one of Doré’s few paintings.

Art Passions has a complete set of these engravings together with many more of the artist’s works. And while we’re on the subject, two of Harry Clarke’s surviving Ancient Mariner drawings appeared in a post last year. A third drawing from the series can be seen here.

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Joseph Noel Paton’s Ancient Mariner

From Patten Wilson to Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901), a Scottish artist whose illustrations for Coleridge’s poem I much prefer to his generic paintings. Other artists often skimp on the ship details but Paton’s crowded deck scenes are done with such accuracy they must have been based on a real vessel. The book was published in 1893, and the plates would appear to be engravings given the presence of another monogram besides that of the artist. The Internet Archive scans aren’t as bad as the Patten Wilson but Paton’s meticulous draughtsmanship is best seen in the near-complete set of images posted at Golden Age Comic Book Stories. And for anyone familiar with my comic strip adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark, the portrait of Enoch Bowen, founder of the Starry Wisdom cult, was based on Paton’s head of the Ancient Mariner in the scene where the sailors are fastening the albatross around the accursed man’s neck.

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Patten Wilson’s illustrated Coleridge

As is evident by the blurred date on the title page, this illustrated Coleridge by Patten Wilson (1868–1928) was published in 1898. Once again, some of these drawings have appeared here before via copies at Chris Mullen’s Visual Telling of Stories where the scans are a lot better quality than the dreadful job done by Google at the Internet Archive. The drawings look passable when reduced in size but the full-size images are so aggressively compressed that much of Wilson’s fine detail is lost. There’s still very little of Wilson’s beautiful work to be found online—and Coleridge’s poetry is freely available everywhere—so the only reason to look at this particular edition is for the illustrations.

As with Gerald Metcalfe’s volume, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner dominates the collection. I love the way Wilson renders the opening scene by placing the Mariner and the wedding guests in the corner of the picture so he can prefigure the tale with the boats waiting in the harbour. And Kubla Khan’s Pleasure Dome is a lot more impressive than Metcalfe’s city in the clouds. Here’s hoping that a better copy turns up eventually.

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Gerald Metcalfe’s illustrated Coleridge

This angel figure appeared here just over a year ago in a selection from Modern Book Illustrators and Their Work (1914). Subsequent searching at the Internet Archive turned up a well-used copy of The Poems of Coleridge (1907) from which the drawing originates. Gerald Metcalfe (1894–1929), was a British artist whose ink renderings often resemble woodcut engravings. Some of the drawings seem a little perfunctory but he does a decent enough job with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem whose wealth of incident is more suited to illustration than many of Coleridge’s shorter pieces.

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Colour photography, 1908

Portrait of Jessie M. King by J. Craig Annan (autochrome).

I don’t recall having seen a photo of artist Jessie M. King prior to this so it’s an additional surprise to find one in colour. All these examples are from Colour Photography: and other recent developments of the art of the camera (1908), one of the many books edited by Charles Holme from features in The Studio magazine. Needless to say, not all the entries are colour but a number of the monochrome plates have their own qualities, such as that painterly effect which so many early photographers were eager to cultivate. Anyone familiar with Gertrude Käsebier’s very painterly The Crystal Gazer, famous for its appearance on the cover of a Cocteau Twins sleeve, may like to know that two more portraits by Ms Käsebier are included in Holme’s selection. For a look at more recent attempts to match the effects of painting with the camera, see this piece by Rick Poynor about the remarkable work of Saul Leiter.

A Tangle After a Storm by Walter Bennington.

A Late Winter Sun by Dr. H. Bachmann (gum print).

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