Norman Rockwell’s illustration sold for fifteen million dollars
Once dismissed beneath fine art, illustration now commands auction fortunes and a global market. Norman Rockwell’s “Breaking Home Ties” fetched US$15.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2006. Guild figures put typical medical illustrators near $70,650 and science illustrators near $72,277—proof that clarifying a process can rival painting a canvas.
An illustration explains or adorns a text, idea, or process for print and digital media—posters, books, teaching kits, games, film. The English word rose from late Middle English senses of illumination and enlightenment, via Old French from Latin illustrare. Practitioners draw, paint, print, collage, or build in 3D software; technical work favors exploded views, cutaways, and diagrams aimed at non-specialists who need an overall sense of what something is or does.
Its craft tracks printing. Egyptian tombs already carried pictorial explanation—Seti I’s burial dates roughly 1294–1279 BC. Medieval manuscripts used hand-painted illuminations; fifteenth-century presses spread woodcuts, such as an 1481 Netherlandish leaf from Jacobus de Voragine’s Lives of the Saints. Seventeenth-century Japan’s ukiyo-e inked expressive woodblocks; Hokusai’s Great Wave remains the signature image. Europe leaned on engraving and etching; William Blake (1757–1827) pioneered relief etching, and lithography soon lifted reproduction quality. Punch (1841–2002) popularized “cartoon” for comic drawing and helped make John Leech the first so-called cartoonist.
By 1900 almost all paper was machine-made—about a thousand pounds a day versus 60–100 by hand—and between 1846 and 1916 book output rose 400 percent while prices halved. America’s “golden age” of magazine and book art ran from before the 1880s into the early twentieth century, with names such as N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and J.C. Leyendecker. Graphic novels and games have since lifted the form’s prestige. In 1934 Aaron Douglas prepared a gouache study for Harlem Renaissance murals at New York’s Schomburg Center, fusing Egyptian profiles, West African masks, cubism, and art deco.
Source: Illustration
