Herkomer's Poster
being R. H. Soden Smith, the Keeper of the Art Library of the South Kensington Museum, Hungerford Pollen and George Wallis, as well as Sir Wyke Bayliss, Sydney Hodges, Henry Blackburn, Professor A. H. Church, Wilfrid Meynell ("John Oldcastle") and Mrs. Meynell, W. W. Fenn, and Leonard Montefiore. During the next three years other names were added—Alan Cole, "Leader Scott," Henry Holliday, Godfrey Turner, Lewis F. Day, Percy Fitzgerald, J. Forbes Robertson (father of Sir John Forbes Robertson) and Phipps Jackson; while original drawings were made by Sir John Millais, Randolph Caldecott, Percy Macquoid, W. H. J. Boot, and other artists of note.
Within three years the magazine was firmly established. The page was then enlarged and the price raised to a shilling. This change was demanded by the general desire for a more complete representation of the varied branches of art, and from this time forth the magazine became a review as well as a record of art, past and present. The circulation at once rose, and it was decided to include in each number a frontispiece consisting of an etching, a photogravure, or a steel plate. It was about this time that Herkomer designed his famous poster for the magazine. It represented the Genius of Art acting apparently as the tutelary divinity of the magazine, spreading its benefits among the eager public, while, in the background on a terrace of the Temple of Art, the Great Masters looked on with grave if languorous approval. The Rev. Eric Robertson, who succeeded Trendell as editor in 1881, had called in at the rooms of the Society of Arts one afternoon to hear part of a lecture by Herkomer upon some such subject as "Art for the Streets." A day or two thereafter, with the consent of Cassell's, he visited Herkomer at Bushey and suggested to him that he might design a large poster to advertise the Magazine of Art. He seized the idea at once, and covenanted to design the poster and procure the assistance of his father to engrave it on wood for the total sum of £70. Father and son
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