D.B. Dowd’s new history of illustration begins with a poster that was never meant to be art.
In 1891, Jules Chéret created an advertisement for the Alcazar d’Été Club in Paris, featuring the singer Kanjarowa in a pink dress, black gloves, and a pose that suggests both self-possession and distance. The image is one of the many examples in Reading Pictures, Dowd’s 400-page study of how illustrations have shaped, reflected, and sometimes manipulated public life. The book ranges from the frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra in AD868 to Molly Crabapple’s Gaza reports in 2015, making a case for illustration as a form of visual thinking with a long global history.
Dowd, a professor of design and American culture studies at Washington University in St Louis, argues that illustrations are best understood in relation to what they point toward: a text, an event, a political message, a commercial pitch, or a social reality. That framework allows him to move fluidly across centuries and media. He places Chéret’s poster in dialogue with Japanese print culture, including the woodcut traditions that helped make such images possible, and with Stuart Davis’s June 1913 cover for Max Eastman’s socialist magazine The Masses, where two working-class women stare back with a mix of irony and fatigue.
The book is strongest when it shows how illustration can register the pressures of modern life. Wu Youru’s Wandering Eyes Giving Way to Wandering Thoughts, made for the 1890 Shanghai Pictorial, depicts two courtesans on a balcony, one with a lute, the other looking down at birds perched on power lines — a quiet image of old and new city life colliding. Duong Ngoc Canh’s Look after the Land, Look after the Youth, from 1966, turns the language of poster art toward wartime urgency, replacing Chéret’s fan with a machine gun.
Dowd is equally attentive to the medium’s darker uses. He notes how children’s books were weaponized for racist instruction, including a 1938 Nazi picture book that taught young readers to distinguish Jews from non-Jews by comparing them to mushrooms. He also traces illustration’s role in consumer culture, from early advertisements to the 1920 Mitsukoshi Kimono Store campaign in Tokyo, which stacked consumer goods into a tower of desire.
The book’s scope is broad, though it leaves out natural history illustration, including John James Audubon and Robert Havell Jr.’s The Birds of America and Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature. Even with that omission, Reading Pictures makes a persuasive argument: illustration is not a lesser art form, but one of the clearest records of how images move through culture, politics, and everyday life.
