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This lot features twelve antique Frederick Barnard illustrations of celebrated Dickens characters. Each plate is a photogravure in black and white on fine printing paper, art area slightly de-bossed in the style of fine art lithography. The images are produced as soft-edged vignettes with classic period styling. These plates may have been drawn from the folio edition of Character Sketches from Dickens published by Cassell in the 1880s.

Frederick Barnard (1846 - September 1896), popularly known as Fred Barnard, was a Victorian illustrator, caricaturist and genre painter. He is noted for his work on the Dickens novels published between 1871 and 1879 by Chapman and Hall.

Barnard was the son of a silversmith. He studied art under Leon Bonnat in Paris, worked in London and at Cullercoats on the Northumberland coast. His work was exhibited at the RA and he worked as an illustrator for Punch, The Illustrated London News and Harper's Weekly. In the 1880s, Fred and Alice joined a colony of artists at Broadway in the Cotswolds.

Barnard undertook an enormous task when he was commissioned in 1871 by Chapman and Hall to illustrate nine volumes of the Household Edition of Dickens's works. Included would be Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Sketches by Boz, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son and Martin Chuzzlewit. He followed in the footsteps of the respected Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz") who had worked with Dickens himself. For his prodigious output of some 450 illustrations over an eight-year period, Barnard could lay just claim to the title of "The Charles Dickens among black-and-white artists." Barnard brought an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Dickens novels to bear on his work.

A young man when he started on his mammoth task, Barnard decided that he would concentrate on scenes other than those that Browne and Dickens had chosen to portray. Whereas Phiz was inclined to create dramatic group scenes for his prints, Barnard was more interested in showing the relationships between pairs of characters. While Phiz had to produce illustrations for the monthly serials as Dickens wrote them, Barnard had the advantage of being able to read the complete work repeatedly before starting on his drawings. At the same time Barnard had to seamlessly blend the characters as visualised by Phiz with his own style, not daring to deviate too much from their established appearance.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Barnard, somewhat like Luke Fildes, had acquired an enviable reputation as a portraitist to the aristocracy and the royal family. (Courtesy of wikipedia)

Each illustration plate impression is approximately 8" x 10" centered on pages measuring approximately 13" x 18". All pictures include glass, matting and frames (however, there are regrettable screw holes through the sides of the frames). Shipping cost (within the U.S.) for this lot will be: $59.50