Dickens, Christmas Stories. ‘You bad boy!’ said Mr. Teterby. 1984

Edwin Austin Abbey made this watercolor illustration, ‘You bad boy! said Mr. Teterby.,’ as part of Dickens' Christmas Stories. The sketchy quality, the pale washes of color, give it a really tentative, searching quality – it feels like the scene is just emerging, flickering into being. Look at the way Abbey contrasts the solid block of red the child clutches, with the pale, watery tones around it. The red almost feels like a wound, or a danger signal. The rest of the scene is rendered in these translucent layers, almost like a memory. You can see the pencil lines underneath, the scaffolding of the drawing, which I love. It reminds me a little of the early Toulouse-Lautrec drawings, where the artist is feeling his way into the subject, not quite sure what he’s looking for. It's like Abbey is inviting us to participate in the act of creation. Rather than presenting a finished, polished scene, he’s showing us the process, the uncertainty, the sheer effort of trying to capture a moment.