Adventures with a Sketch Book by Donald Maxwell

A British landscape artist wanders around Europe

Donald Maxwell (1877-1936) was an English illustrator of books and periodicals. He specialized in landscapes and literally wrote the book on the subject, Landscape Sketching in Pen and Ink, published in 1932. Maxwell also penned around thirty travel memoirs that he illustrated himself. He would travel around Britain, continental Europe, or the Middle East making sketches of the scenery, which would then be used to illustrate anecdotes of his journeys. One of these self-illustrated travel accounts is Adventures with a Sketch Book, published in 1914.

The generic title, not specifying any particular location, is an indication of the hodgepodge nature of the book’s contents. This is not one continuous travel narrative, but rather a series of brief chapters covering a variety of locations. The book opens in Italy with Maxwell visiting the Renaissance master painter Titian’s hometown. He then travels through France on a series of canal barges, spends some time in Switzerland and Bohemia, treks across Kent to Canterbury, marvels at the architecture in Ragusa, Sicily, and enjoys the beauty of the humble mountains of the Netherlands. Finally, he is invited as a journalist on a festive promotional railroad tour through Austria, where he also explores some rugged terrain on foot.

The text is a mix of scenic summaries and humorous travel anecdotes. Sometimes Maxwell is accompanied by a traveling companion known only as Brown, who may be fictitious. Their adventures are never quite as funny as Maxwell seems to think they are. The most interesting thing that happens to the artist is when he is arrested in France as a spy for sketching a military fort. When I first became aware of this book, I was hoping for something along the lines of Rockwell Kent’s self-illustrated travel adventures, but Maxwell’s writing is nothing to get excited about. His descriptions of the natural landscape are more successful than his jokes, but one wishes he would have included a little more about the history and culture of the places he visited.

This is, however, an art book after all, so its real purpose is to serve as a showcase for Maxwell’s art. Almost every page of this 215-page volume features an illustration. Some occupy a full page, but most are smaller spot illustrations. Maxwell’s pen and ink drawings come in a spectrum of styles ranging from frameable finished works to intentionally rough and rapid scribblings. There are also some hand-drawn maps that are very hard to read. I read a digital copy of this book, so the art probably suffered some as a result of the scanning. In general the art in the book is reproduced rather small, which doesn’t do justice to Maxwell’s attention to detail. Several of the illustrations are in color. They do not appear to be full color, but rather watercolor washes printed in spot colors, usually green and yellow, over the black and white drawings. For the most part Maxwell’s illustrations of mountain scenery and historic architecture are really quite beautiful, the larger and most polished pieces being more successful than the more dashed-off gestural drawings.

Though Maxwell wrote a lot of these books, they are hard to find, even on the internet, despite many being in the public domain. While the writing of Adventures with a Sketch Book may not qualify as an essential travel narrative, anyone interested in landscape drawing, printmaking, or book illustration will enjoy viewing and learning from Maxwell’s accomplished artworks.
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Illustrations from the book: