Winter 2026
Not the full picture
Illustration: A Concise History
By Andrew Hall. Art direction and series design: Kummer and Herrman. Layout: Adam Hay Studio. Thames & Hudson, £19.99 Reviewed by Rick Poynor
The appearance of History of Illustration (Fairchild Books) in 2018 marked a significant moment in the study of the discipline. Aimed at student readers, it was, incredibly, the first intensive study of its kind, a massive survey of world illustration written by many contributors, which seemed reasonable given the book’s immense scope (see review in Eye 99). In a field hitherto lacking much history at all, who could have claimed expertise across subject matter and centuries of production that spanned Japan, China, India, Africa, Latin America and the Muslim World, as well as the United States and Europe?
It raised the question of whether any researcher would now be galvanised into delivering a briefer, more manageable history aimed at professional and general readers. Andrew Hall’s Illustration: A Concise History, published in Thames & Hudson’s long-running, highly acclaimed and modestly proportioned ‘World of Art’ series, is that book. To put this in context and underline the extent to which illustration has been neglected, Richard Hollis’s Graphic Design: A Concise History arrived in the series three decades ago. Hall suggests that illustration has been ‘folded’ into the history of graphic design. The reality is that it has mostly been ignored. The interconnections between the two disciplines cry out for critical and historical investigation, but Hall’s account avoids them, too; there simply isn’t enough room in a concise survey.
The book arrives at a time when, as Hall puts it in his introduction, there is an ‘international directive to decolonize the curriculum’ in education. From this starting point, he intends his history to be as representative as possible of race, gender and global perspectives. Within a few lines, he has conceded that a history of illustration could be written by a ‘thousand different authors, in a thousand different ways.’ That might on the surface seem inarguable, but we are unlikely to get a thousand histories of illustration, so it is not unreasonable to expect the book to have a relatively secure grasp of its subject, like any other title in the series …
Rick Poynor writer, Eye founder
Read the full version in Eye no. 109 vol. 29, 2025
Top. Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring by Laura Knight, 1943, an oil painting used to promote women’s work in factories in the Second World War. Below. Cover of Illustration: A Concise History
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