ABSTRACT
The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.
(“On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature”, Contemporary Review 47 [April 1885])
Stevenson wrote a great deal on the art of writing and on the art of pictures. In essays produced from the mid-1870s through the 1880s, Stevenson laid down an evolving theoretical foundation pertaining to the relationship between the literary and visual arts. The subject “Stevenson on Art” would require a much more in-depth treatment than this chapter can provide, given the breadth and complexity of Stevenson’s views of contemporary culture. The word “art” itself is broadly used by Stevenson to refer to the major arts of literature, painting and music. Letters to his cousin Bob (the artist Robert Stevenson) from the 1870s detail various opinions and theories on these topics, and through his correspondence and essay output from the mid-1870s, we can discern an evolving set of theories pertaining to the sister-arts in relation to his own. Drawing from these essays, including six he wrote for The Magazine of Art which was edited by his friend William Ernest Henley, this chapter will focus on Stevenson’s understanding of the visual arts, in particular painting and book-illustration. The illustration of texts is the natural point at which literature and painting meet, and as such, there is an often uncomfortable power-dynamic between the two forms. The illustration of literary texts was a rmly established commercial and cultural practice by the 1880s when Stevenson hit the heights of his fame, and early correspondence reveals Stevenson’s commercial understanding of the form. However, he also saw the vast artistic potential of marrying text and image. This chapter will build on recent scholarship that is devoted to repositioning Stevenson as a major writer about art.1 It will identify and discuss Stevenson’s theories on contemporary visual art and illustration from his extensive essay writing on the subject produced before he left Britain in 1887. In doing so, it is possible to trace Stevenson’s creation of his literary-visual aesthetic for popular ction, from theory to application.
