Sidney Harold Meteyard - The Annunciation: an illustration to Longfellow's 'Golden Legend'

signed with monogram (lower left)
pencil, watercolour and bodycolour on paper
13¼ x 16¼ in.

Meteyard's illustrations to the edition of Longfellow's Golden Legend published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1910 were his most ambitious essay in this field. Indeed he only undertook one other book single-handed, A Day with John Milton by May Byron (1913). In the 1890s, however, he had contributed illustrations to two works produced jointly by students at the Birmingham School of Art under the supervision of A.J. Gaskin: A Book of Pictured Carols, published at Christmas 1893, and The Quest, a magazine that ran for six numbers from November 1894 to July 1896.

No-one was more closely associated than Meteyard with the Arts and Crafts movement in Birmingham. He was a prolific designer of stained glass, illuminated rolls of honour and executed enamel plaques, often in collaboration with his wife Kate Eadie. He also taught enamelling, gesso-work, leather-work and other crafts at the School of Art, where, having been a student himself, he remained on the staff until 1933.

However, when it came to book illustration, he did not, like so many Birmingham artists, follow the great example set by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press and seek to make his images an integral part of the overall design. The illustrations to The Golden Legend may be his masterpiece in this field, but he saw them as highly finished easel pictures that remain essentially independant of the text. Far from being black-and-white drawings that might pass for woodcuts, they are unashamedly watercolours that could only have been reproduced by photographic means.

Meteyard executed twenty-five illustrations for The Golden Legend, and the Annunciation offered here has every claim to be the finest. Perhaps that is why the publishers chose to make it the book's frontispiece. Two more were included in The Last Romantics exhibition held at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 1989 (cat. nos. 87-8, one illustrated), and four were in Masterly Art, a celebration of the Arts and Crafts in Birmingham mounted at the Art Gallery in 1986-7 but unfortunately not immortalised by a catalogue.


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