Bohemian Girl - 'The Rescue of Arline' 1910

Byam Shaw made this illustration of The Rescue of Arline, probably with watercolor and ink. The colors here are all jewel tones – deep reds, greens, blues – evoking a sense of drama and maybe even a little melodrama. Look at that figure standing on the precipice, draped in red! You can almost feel the wind whipping around them! The artist's process seems pretty deliberate, lots of layering and hatching of the paint. I'm really drawn to the way he renders the rocky landscape, too, all these little touches of brown and grey and green, almost like he's trying to capture every facet of the stone. It reminds me a bit of Arthur Rackham, with that same attention to detail and sense of fantasy, or maybe even some of the Pre-Raphaelites, with their love of narrative and romanticism. It's cool to see how different artists riff on similar themes, creating their own unique worlds in the process.