Brief Biographical Details
William Small was a Scot. Born in Edinburgh, on 27 May 1843, he later worked in that city as a hack-artist designing illustrations of bedsteads and gas brackets. He trained at the Royal Scottish Academy and moved to London in 1865, where he quickly established himself as a versatile painter and illustrator. In his paintings he was mainly concerned with rustic themes, and some of his later work embodies a journalistic representation of the sufferings of the poor. Painted in the social realist style of Herkomer and Bastien-Lepage, these paintings are still collected. However, he has always been principally known as an illustrator whose work bore comparison with the best of his contemporaries.
Reid (1928) writes enthusiastically of his power (216), and Goldman (1996) is equally effusive. Yet, as Goldman continues, his 'star has fallen' (140), and he is now relatively unknown. This fall from grace probably reflects the fact that his greatest achievements came early in his career, from the sixties to the mid to late seventies, while his later work is less accomplished. Critics praise his hard-edged style of the sixties, but generally dislike his impressionistic later designs, which are usually condemned as lazy and ill-disciplined. — Simon Cooke
Commentary
- Small as an Illustrator
- Small’s Illustrations for George Eliot’s Adam Bede
- The Graphic and Social Realism of the Seventies and Eighties
Works
- Frontispiece for George Eliot's Adam Bede
- Lilies
- Griffith Gaunt
- Deliverance
- Chrissy was grateful for his evident sympathy
- Carissimo
- Griffith Gaunt [men in a rowboat]
- Griffith Gaunt [woman hiding behind tree]
- ‘There’s no help for it’
- Dinah and Adam
- Adam Bede and Arthur Donnithorne
- Mrs Poyser and the Old Squire
- Dinah and Hetty in the Prison
- In the Wood
- Scholar and Carpenter
- “The Audience,” observed Lord Rockminster, “would distinctly prefer to have the song sung”
- Here the pot of foaming stout claimed his attention; he buried his head in it
- She turned from him and put her hand on the handle of the door
- They were now arrived at the doctor’s house
- Indeed the young lady was so rude as to leave the table more than once, and go stand at the open window
- The bird stopped in mid-air and came down with a thump on the heather
- The conclusion of the fight proved to be a series of rapid and cautious skimishes between the salmon and old Rober
- Lionel had just time to get a glimpse of the wounded stag, which was tumbling pitifully along
- “This is ferry strange, Miss Honnor,” said her, “that the fly-book is not in the bag”
- “Good-bye, Mr. Moore,” said the pleasant-mannered young matron to him
- Major Fitz-David set matters right in his irrestible way
- She was a middle-aged woman
Works Consulted
Goldman, Paul. Victorian Illustration: The Pre-Raphaelites, the Idyllic School and the High Victorians. Aldershot: Scolar, 1996.
Reid, Forrest. Illustrators of the Eighteen Sixties. 1928; reprint, New York: Dover, 1975.
Last modified 27 July 2021