A major new history of illustration that follows this artistic and professional practice across four centuries and through diverse traditions, cultures, and contexts

For centuries, illustrators have worked in a wide variety of industries, including fashion, publishing, advertising, education, entertainment, science, food, interior design, architecture, and medicine. Although illustration shares the same fundamental visual language as fine art, it is created as the result of a client-led brief, with imposed parameters and for an intended audience. In this visually lavish book, Andrew Hall presents a chronological, international survey of the history of illustration, revealing the broad connections of this discipline with technological innovation, political events, patterns of trade and travel, and cultural influences.

Hall begins with the eighteenth-century political satire of Gillray, Rowlandson, and Cruikshank, and continues through the early illustrated children's books of Greenaway, Allingham, and Shippen Green; the magazine work and advertisements of Mucha and Toulouse-Lautrec; the modernism of Lempicka and Cassandre; the countercultural images of Glaser, Douglas, Wilson, and Robbins; the late twentieth-century illustrations of Crumb, Baseman, Ware, and Pettibon; and the most recent work of Marjane Satrapi and Shepard Fairey, among many others. The evolution of illustration is also one of print culture, and Hall examines the technologies of intaglio relief, engraving, lithography, screen printing, and digital paper printing; as well as the application of illustration to areas such as botany, album covers, graphic novels, animation, gaming, and infographics. He explores the role of illustration in relation to the two industrial revolutions, the abuses of the slave trade and colonialism, the two world wars, and political activism; and the relationship between illustration, photography, and the fine arts.

Sumptuous and comprehensive, A Visual History of Illustration offers a remarkable look at how artists have long created illustrated images to mirror and comment upon their times, allowing a way for others to consider and understand the world.

Andrew Hall is senior lecturer of illustration in the Central Saint Martins Graphic Communication Design Program at the University of the Arts London. He is the author of Illustration.