#having a lot of issues maintaining my focus while doing alt text so i'm kind of changing my approach to the broader project by like

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 2: Rowland Wheelwright

That's right, we're jumping centuries and mediums!

...specifically, from Phiz's engravings for the original 1859 monthly installments to Wheelwright's paintings for this 1925 edition! (warning: in the following, there is some violent imagery, and one image in the third grouping has blood)

As I'd mentioned in the announcement post, these illustrators will be highlighted completely out of chronological order to make it more organic when I continue to find more and more artists' work to add to the queue - so I wanted to start off with a particularly dramatic leap in time (and style!) to give a sense of the sheer variety of art we're going to be looking at here!

This also happens to be one of the sets that I scanned myself - most of these beautiful illustrations haven't anywhere on the internet (by my own intensive research at least!) until now. It's my joy to finally get to share them!

Overall, I want to give my own opinions and takes on the work of each illustrator as little as possible so that everyone can experience it in their own way, but the true beauty in his attention to detail in color, characterization, costuming, composition, and shadow calls for some comment.

This is the work of someone who loved and appreciated both the story itself and the act of illustrating it - I'm grateful to him for bringing these images into existence.

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

#A Tale of Two Cities #AToTC #dickens #charlels dickens #classic literature #victorian literature #illustration #illustrators #Rowland Wheelwright #1920s #my scans #alright this is my first one queued! #having a lot of issues maintaining my focus while doing alt text so i'm kind of changing my approach to the broader project by like #winging it basically #gonna queue stuff out of order and do stuff like that #so it feels good to be really doing that! queuing this a week and a half before it's gonna be posted! #and i'm just so excited to be posting these in particular they are just so lovely #darnay's head held high as he holds his spouse and child tight...the stress on carton's face and the hand on darnay's shoulder... #the entire pross and defarge drawing! ugh! this man understood Story #even the simple detail of charles holding his hat to his head in the driving rain....it's almost always about the details man it really is