Landscape Sketching in Pen and Ink: With Notes on Architectural Subjects by Donald Maxwell

Great illustrations, but not enough preliminary sketches

Donald Maxwell (1877-1936) was an English illustrator who specialized in landscape drawings. Over the course of his career, he created hundreds if not thousands of scenic illustrations for newspapers and books, including many travel books that he wrote himself. Maxwell was enough of a recognized expert in the field to write his own how-to guide to illustration. Landscape Sketching in Pen and Ink was first published in 1932. I read the 2019 paperback edition from Dover Publications.

I admire Maxwell’s art, but this book was a disappointment. There just isn’t enough step-by-step insight into Maxwell’s process of illustration. The book is loaded with Maxwell’s beautiful, finished illustrations reproduced from previously published books. There are hardly any examples, however, of the preliminary sketches that led to these completed pictures. The “Look Inside” sample pages displayed on Amazon lead the reader to believe that the book is going to be composed of instructional, in-progress drawings. Examples of such preliminary drawings, however, do not appear beyond page 16. In the first chapter, Maxwell basically teaches you how to draw a brick wall and how to shade a cylinder. After that, he just discusses his finished illustrations, pointing out compositional considerations and variations in tone. There is some merit in these discussions—the book is not totally useless—but it doesn’t give aspiring landscape artists much of an education into how they are supposed to rapidly capture scenery on-site en plein air.

At the start of Chapter 2, Maxwell already assumes the reader is a professional illustrator. Of course, 90 years ago when this book was published, there were a lot of artists working in black and white line illustration, so he would have had quite an audience to address. There is an entire chapter, for example, on how to execute a drawing that will reproduce on a commercial printing press without detrimental loss of detail. Today, the professional audience for such trade secrets has unfortunately shrunk since book illustration has mostly been relegated to juvenile literature, mostly by cartoonists, while changing tastes and advances in printing technology have rendered pen and ink illustration nearly obsolete. To the artist interested in this style of drawing, Maxwell’s book now serves as a nostalgic time capsule of a golden age of book illustration. What a joy to have been an artist in Maxwell’s day, when representational landscape art and fine bookmaking were more widely appreciated by the general public then they are today.

While Maxwell’s writing is a disappointment, the book is beautifully illustrated. Chapters 1 through 4 showcase Maxwell’s own art, while Chapter 5 is a textless gallery of pen and ink drawings by Maxwell’s contemporaries, including Frank Brangwyn, Ernest Peixotto, and Otto Fischer. All the images are black and white, as one would expect of a book on this subject. My medium of choice is linocut prints, so I like to have examples of black and white art on hand in order to sample and compare other artists’ techniques for rendering trees, water, sky, etc. To that end, I think Landscape Sketching in Pen and Ink will prove a valuable sourcebook of instructive artworks, even though I didn’t learn much about pen and ink drawing from Maxwell’s text. Dover’s books are always inexpensively priced, and in this case the pictures alone are worth the money spent.
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