Reading Pictures: A History of Illustration

This illuminating history from Dowd (Stick Figures), an art professor at Washington University, draws from the oldest printed books and the newest media to trace how illustrations in the modern era have evolved, shaped texts, and engaged audiences. Dowd demonstrates how illustrations have reflected developments in modern media and culture, from the 15th-century Nuremberg Chronicle, a lavishly illustrated “monument of book design and production,” to early-19th-century books and newspapers that negotiated ideas about the “romantic vision of childhood,” such as the illustrations in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Raggedy Ann stories. He traces the origins of present-day propaganda to the “rhetorical figures” that Protestant Reformation–era cartoonists used to critique opponents, a tradition that continued through 18th-century Japanese woodcuts critiquing outsiders and into the boom in 20th-century political cartooning. Individual chapters explore how illustration and commercial art intersected with ideas of race, gender, and counterculture across the globe. Dowd’s selection of illustrations is generous, eclectic, and thought-provoking; he contrasts, for example, two illustrations of Custer’s Last Stand, one by white American illustrator F. Otto Becker and one by Indigenous artist Henry Oscar One Bull. The result sheds fresh light on a vital tool of media and culture consumption. (Mar.)