The insight that illustrations provide details not mentioned in the text does not necessarily have to imply a critique of illustrations. Thus Goethe (in his conversations with Eckermann), for instance, explicitly praises Delacroix’s Faust illustrations as exceeding Goethe’s own conceptualization or imagination of these scenes:
[D]ie vollkommnere Einbildungskraft eines solchen Künstlers zwingt uns, die Situationen so gut zu denken, we er sie selber gedacht hat. Und wenn ich nun gestehen muß, daß der Herr Delacroix meine eigene Vorstellung bey Scenen übertroffen hat, die die ich selber gemacht habe, um wie viel mehr werden nicht die Leser alles lebendig und über ihre Imagination hinausgehend finden.
However, at least by the late nineteenth century, the sense emerged that illustrators’ additions ran counter to the writers’ intentions. We find this concern expressed in the article “The Tyranny of the Pictorial” by Sidney Fairfield, published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in June 1895. Fairfield writes:
The highest thought, the deepest truth, the most exquisite bit of sustained description, poetry, dialogue, love, tragedy, humour, realism of any kind, all are subjected by the weeklies and monthlies to the tyranny of the pictorial, until everything a writer writes, and too often, alas, that which he doesn’t write, is seized upon and illustrated as if in the endeavour to help him make himself understood.
(Fairfield 864; our emphasis)
Works Cited
Fairfield, Sidney. “The Tyranny of the Pictorial.” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, June 1985, pp. 861–64.
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