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Then there was a division in the academy — the 18th century German institution of specialised education spread across the West — and these two activities became specialised and purified disciplines. There were people who wrote and people who made pictures. That’s why art and literature are entirely separate disciplines to this day. People who made picture stories, like Edward Lear, Rodolphe Töpffer and William Blake, didn’t fit neatly into either discipline. They wanted to cross the boundaries and mix the two. These men were exceptions to the rule that illustrator and writer are two different people.
As we approached 1900, the rivalry between pictures and text turned into antagonism. Serious authors said, “Paying people to illustrate our stories is like paying people to compete with our words.” I think it was Henry James who finally said he didn’t want scenes from his book to have spatial and visual form, because he couldn’t control that. And so we have a hundred years of prose novels without pictures. That’s sort of how it happened.
(picture story by Adam Meuse)
