One of the most prolific black-and-white artists of the fin de siècle, Celia Anna Levetus (1874-1936) not only contributed to The Yellow Book (1894-97) but also cultivated a wide-ranging career, first as a book-plate designer and book illustrator and secondly as an art critic and writer of poetry and fiction. In 1891, she enrolled as a student at the progressive Birmingham School of Art, where she developed the style which she is best known for today (Wright 108). Although Levetus was born to English parents in Montreal, Québec, Canada, her family relocated to London before eventually settling in Birmingham in 1887 (Wright 108). She was part of a prominent Jewish family as the granddaughter of the writer Celia Levetus (née Moss) (c. 1819-73) (Rubinstein 570). As a pupil at the Birmingham School of Art – which was quickly becoming one of the most well-known art institutions in the country – Levetus began to develop her style characterised by her Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) inspired figures and Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau sensibilities, with works featuring intricate detailing and sinuous linework. She was exposed to an educational ethos based on the aesthetic and socio-political principles of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement, particularly the work of designer and writer William Morris (1830-92) (Cooke).

The Birmingham School of Art’s educational ethos was shaped by painter and designer Edward R. Taylor (1838-1911), who upon his appointment as headmaster in 1877 began to further develop the school’s approach to art instruction. This instruction included a curriculum centred on using traditional materials and training in the guise of handicraft and guild-based methods of production. The instruction offered by the Birmingham School of Art catered to both aesthetic and practical considerations, readily preparing students for employment after graduation. Morris became an integral figure at the school, delivering lectures to pupils and examining their work. He was a close associate of the teaching staff, alongside the artists Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98) and Walter Crane (1845-1915). Both male and female students were exposed to a range of disciplines, blurring the line between the fine arts and the decorative arts. In the guise of the distinctive Birmingham School style, women illustrators were able to gain recognition like their male peers (Cooke).

Levetus undertook the initial classes offered to all new pupils before deciding that her best subject was book illustration. Taylor noticed this talent in Levetus and placed her under the wing of the illustration teachers Arthur Gaskin (1862-1928) and Charles March Gere (1869-1957). She quickly became one of the most successful students at the school, winning a South Kensington studentship in 1893 and the first prize in a competition sponsored by The Studio for her contribution to Andrew White Tuer’s History of the Horn-Book (1896) (Wright 108). Crane, a judge for the competition, described Levetus’s entry as “decorative in effect and quaint in feeling” (“The Editor’s Room,” XVI). He later noted in his Of The Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New (1896) that “Miss Celia Levetus, must be mentioned among the leading artists of the Birmingham School” (Crane 207).

Specialising in the design of book-plates, Levetus was featured in full-length books on the subject of women book-plate designers by Norna Labouchere (1895) and Wilbur Macey Stone (1902). Many of Levetus’s book-plates reproduced in articles and books depict women and girls engaged in the act of reading, a subject matter which would also be portrayed in her contribution to The Yellow Book. Her book-plates were praised by artists and critics alike, including Gleeson White (1851-98). Writing in The Studio, White pointed out: “The use of bold line, and the simplifying of details, are all excellent qualities” in the book-plate Levetus designed for Taylor (White 98). In 1895, Levetus was featured in A Book of Nursery Songs and Rhymes edited by Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) and illustrated by members of the Birmingham School working under Gaskin’s direction. Her contribution to this book, an illustration of three figures and a goose as a visual representation of the nursery rhyme “Goosey, Goosey, Gander,” highlights Levetus’s unique rendering of children in the style of Greenaway’s Regency-inspired figures while also adding her interest in effective detailing and decorative borders.

Like her colleagues at the Birmingham School of Art, Levetus was influenced by the illustrations of the late Middle Ages and particularly the intricate woodcuts championed by Morris (Cooke). In this example from Ignácz Kúnos’s Turkish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (1901), she places her Greenaway-esque figures in a composition comprised of intricate linework and detailing to demonstrate her ability as an illustrator and engraver while also combining her disparate influences (fig.1). Pupils at the Birmingham School of Art were taught to engrave their wood blocks themselves, an exception to the typical partnership which existed between illustrator and engraver that separated the creative process and labour (Cooke). Levetus would have mostly likely engraved her illustration for A Book of Nursery Songs and Rhymes herself, establishing her proficiency as an artist and craftswoman. Her time as a student at the Birmingham School of Art not only gave her the skills and experience she needed to enter the field of commercial illustration but also opportunities for exposure. A headpiece Levetus designed for “The Art of Prose Story” appeared in Volume 4 of The Quest (1894-96), a little magazine which promoted the work of members of the Birmingham School.

Although Levetus was readily featured alongside her male peers in The Quest, women illustrators still faced discrimination due to their gender. As Rebecca N. Mitchell has uncovered, the work Levetus produced in a studio or guild did not have the same chance of public exhibition as the work of her male colleagues. Mitchell has also notes that women illustrators like Levetus were expected to produce works which predominantly portrayed women and girls and were sentimental, in compliance with Victorian notions of what was suitable for women to illustrate (Mitchell 32). However, one of the few platforms that included both male and female artists based on aesthetic merit was The Yellow Book. By Volume 9, published in April 1896, women artists were increasingly being featured in the art section of The Yellow Book. This volume, dedicated almost exclusively to works contributed by Birmingham School members, was no exception. Women, including Levetus, contributed six out of the seventeen total artworks. Although illustrator and designer Mabel Dearmer (1872-1915) contributed the cover and title page designs to Volume 9 and became the first woman to do so, she was not trained at the Birmingham School of Art. Many of the works contributed by women such as “The Lady of Shalott” by Florence M. Rudland (1872-1903) and “Come unto These Yellow Sands” by H. Isabel Adams (1853-1937) challenged how women were typically depicted at the fin de siècle, portraying female figures actively engaged in the world. Levetus also subverted female stereotypes in her contribution to The Yellow Book, arguably one of her best-known works.

In “A Reading from Herrick,” Levetus references popular culture while depicting a subject matter familiar to The Yellow Book’s audience ever since illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) designed the little magazine’s first Prospectus: the woman reader. Levetus’s illustration portrays a group of three women seated together in a field as one of them reads from a book. As “A Reading from Herrick” is filled with Art Nouveau design elements, it is a departure from the Arts and Crafts ethos of her previous illustrations. This illustration demonstrates Levetus’s ability to easily adapt to the latest art movement. Her Art Nouveau illustration is characterised by its masses of black-on-white and strong linework, as shown in the swirly stems of the daffodils placed in the bottom right corner (Cooke). The three women are wearing Aesthetic Dress, a type of clothing which rejects the tight corsets and unwieldy crinolines of mainstream Victorian fashion, giving women the freedom of movement needed to easily escape to the countryside, as depicted in this scene. Levetus’s illustration potentially portrays New Women with progressive views. The woman in her illustration is reading from a book of poems by Robert Herrick (1591-1674), a seventeenth-century poet whose works were recovered in the nineteenth. One of Herrick’s well-known volumes of poetry, Hesperides (1648), critiqued socio-political principles relating to property, gender, religion, and government (Mitchell 89).

“A Reading from Herrick” is immediately followed in Volume 9 with an essay titled “Mary Astell” by Alice Mary Gordon (c. 1850/51-1929) on the next page. Gordon’s essay discusses Astell’s advocacy for the advancement of women’s education and how expanded educational opportunities would offer women a role beyond that of wife. As a learned woman who wrote articles and books on domesticity and electricity, Gordon keenly championed Astell’s ideas (Brock 681). The fact that The Yellow Book’s editors decided to pair an illustration of a woman reader with an essay on a proto-feminist by a successful woman writer further cultivates the little magazine’s association with the New Woman. However, reviews of Volume 9 were negative. In a review published in The New York Times, the author pointed out: “The popularity of the Yellow Book has declined of late…which seems to show that the critics cannot make a work popular by abusing it” (“Review of The Yellow Book,” 372-3). Punch mentioned Dearmer’s cover and title page in their discussion of the art section, noting that her “designs are of that grotesque, fantastic stuff that dreams are made of,” while “Stanstead Abbots,” an illustration contributed by male artist E. H. New (1871-1931), “is delightful. We know that typical old-fashioned village, be it called by any other name” (“Our Booking Office,” 229). Interestingly, this same reviewer praised, albeit rather sarcastically, Andrew White Tuer’s A History of the Horn-Book, when they wrote: “No wise collector will fail to secure for his library [this] most complete, exhaustive, and exhausting [history]…” (“Our Booking Office,” 229). This is the same illustrated book for which Levetus won first prize in a competition for her contribution (Wright 108).

Even if the little magazine was not in its prime according to The New York Times and Punch, Levetus realised that contributing to The Yellow Book could advance her career. In a letter to publisher and editor John Lane (1854-1925), Levetus writes: “Did you see the interview with [Dearmer] in the ‘Sketch’? I mean to become a celebrity and get interviewed some day” (Levetus). Levetus moved closer to Dearmer’s status when she contributed two illustrations to the first volume of Womanhood (1898-1907), a progressive magazine founded and edited by Ada Sarah Ballin (1862-1906) that spoke to the interests and desires of the New Woman (Sebba 128). In “Excelsior,” which accompanies a poem penned by her brother Edward, Levetus depicts a towering female figure dressed in an elaborate gown and sweeping robe leading a group of women. Through this illustration, Levetus declared that the New Woman was a powerful site for female emancipation and solidarity. However, in the same volume, she also portrayed a more traditional female role in her illustration of a woman seated in a domestic setting with a child sitting on her lap, which accompanied the poem “The Cottager to Her Infant” by William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Although on first appearance these two illustrations of womanhood seem to compete with one another, Levetus is also perhaps suggesting that modern women could embody both new and conventional roles.

In addition to contributing to The Yellow Book and Womanhood, Levetus began to receive commissions to illustrate books by British publishers such as Chapman ＆ Hall and Lawrence ＆ Bullen. She contributed a set of illustrations to a volume of poetry produced by her brother Edward and published in 1897 by Chapman ＆ Hall titled Verse Fancies. Two years later, Levetus received one of her most important commissions when she was asked by Wells, Gardner, Darton ＆ Co. to illustrate a new edition of Songs of Innocence by William Blake (1757-1827). In 1901, she illustrated Ignácz Kúnos’s Turkish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales for Lawrence ＆ Bullen. Levetus published her second illustrated edition of Blake’s poetry, his Songs of Experience, with Nutt in 1902. Her work illustrating Blake earned her a full-length article in the prominent Art Journal (1839-1912). Here Levetus is described as “an illustrator who has already achieved something; but no secret need to be made of the fact that, though an illustrator of experience, her best work remains, I hope, yet to be done, and in no sense is finality possible in any consideration of her work…” (Bromhead 238).

However, by the end of the 1890s Levetus’s career was transitioning from that of a visual artist to a writer as she began to contribute art criticism to periodicals such as The Artist. In one of her earliest published pieces of criticism, which appeared in the January 1902 issue of The Artist and was titled “A Few Words on Elementary Art Training,” she dismisses old-fashioned approaches. Here Levetus criticizes the drawing instruction offered by art institutions such as South Kensington. She instead favours a system where drawing is taught through the close act of looking, citing the opinions of influential artists such as Crane and William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) (Levetus 25-29). That same year Levetus married Eric Pearson Nicholson and began to publish under her married name and occasionally the pseudonym Diana Forbes (Rubinstein 570). This output, largely consisting of novels, would become the cornerstone of her oeuvre. Levetus’s maiden name appears in the October 1924 issue of The Bookman and this is one of the few accounts published after her career change that mentions her work as a visual artist (“The Bookman’s Diary,” 28).

As critics of Levetus in the twentieth century have mostly focused on her career as a married writer, her work as a visual artist has largely been overshadowed. However, her illustration and book-plates have been recovered in the twenty-first century. Levetus’s “A Reading from Herrick” was featured in the front cover design of Women and British Aestheticism (1999). Scholars such as Rebecca N. Mitchell have published articles which outline the entirety of Levetus’s prolific and exceptional career. Her distinctive style demonstrates her savvy ability to adhere to different art movements to remain relevant in a crowded and competitive market. Levetus provided her unique perspective on the New Woman in her work. It is through her progressive and varied career, which spoke to a multitude of artistic and literary movements, that Celia Anna Levetus has solidified her place in the history of fin-de-siècle illustration and design.

©2024, Michelle Reynolds

Michelle Reynolds is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture and English at the University of Exeter. Her thesis is on the relationship between the professionalisation of Victorian and Edwardian women illustrators and cartoonists in Britain and the emergence of the New Woman. More broadly, her research interests include art and literature of the long nineteenth century, focusing on women artists and writers, gender and sexuality, print and exhibition culture, photography, fashion, and film. She is currently a PGR Representative for the University of Exeter’s Centre for Victorian Studies and an editor for Romance, Revolution and Reform.

Selected Publications by Celia Anna Levetus

• “The Birmingham School of Art—The Annual Exhibition of Students’ Works.” The Artist, vol. 29, September 1900, pp. 439-44.

• “A Few Words on Elementary Art Training.” The Artist, vol. 33, January 1902, pp. 25-29.

• “Notes on the Pre-Raphaelite Pictures in the Birmingham Art Gallery.” The Artist, vol. 20, October 1897, pp. 467-73.

• “A Reading from Herrick.” The Yellow Book, vol. 9, 1896, p. 102. Yellow Book Digital Edition, edited by Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, 2011-2014. Yellow Nineties 2.0, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2020, https://1890s.ca/yb9-levetus-herrick/

• Selected Illustrated Works by Celia Anna Levetus

• Blake, William. Songs of Experience. Nutt, 1902.

• —. Songs of Innocence. Wells, Gardner, Darton ＆ Co., 1899.

• Brockington, W. A. “The Art of the Prose Story.” The Quest, vol. 4, November 1895, pp. 16-26.

• “The Cottager to Her Infant.” Womanhood, vol. 1, no. 1, December 1898, p. 85.

• “Excelsior.” Womanhood, vol. 1, no. 1, December 1898, p. 9.

• “Goosey, Goosey, Gander.” A Book of Nursery Songs and Rhymes, edited by S. Baring-Gould, Methuen ＆ Company, 1895, p. 22.

• Levetus, Edward L. Verse Fancies. Chapman ＆ Hall, 1897.

• Kúnos, Ignácz. Turkish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales. Lawrence ＆ Bullen, 1901.

Selected Publications about Celia Anna Levetus

• “The Bookman’s Diary.” The Bookman, vol. 67, no. 397, October 1924, pp. 27-31.

• Bromhead, H. W. “An Illustrator of Blake.” Art Journal, vol. 62, 1900, pp. 237-39.

• —. “Miss Celia Levetus: A Young Illustrator.” The Artist, vol. 17-18, 1896, pp. 218-20.

• Cooke, Simon. “The Birmingham School of Illustration.” The Victorian Web, 30 June 2020,
  https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/birmingham.html.

• —. “The Illustrations of Celia Levetus.” The Victorian Web, 3 October 2020,
  https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/levetus/cooke.html.

• Crane, Walter. Of The Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New. George Bell and Sons, 1896.

• “The Editor’s Room.” The Studio, vol. 3, no. 11, September 1894, pp. I-XLVIII.

• Labouchere, Norna. Ladies Book-Plates: An Illustrated Handbook for Collectors and Book-Lovers. George Bell and Sons, 1895.

• Mitchell, Rebecca N. “Rediscovering Celia Anna Levetus.” Burlington Magazine, vol. 160, no. 1378, January 2018, pp. 31-37.

• —. “Robert Herrick, Victorian Poet: Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, and the Victorian Recovery of Hesperides.” Modern Philology, vol. 113, no. 1, August 2015, pp. 88-115.

• Pugh, E. “Mrs. C. A. Nicholson.” The Bookman, vol. 67, 1925, p. 305.

• Stone, Wilbur Macey. Women Designers of Book-Plates. Randolph R. Beam, 1902.

• White, Gleeson. “Some Recent Book-Plates.” The Studio, vol. 7, no. 36, March 1896, pp. 93-98.

• W. H. K. Wright. “Modern Book-Plate Designers. No. 14—Miss Celia Levetus.” Journal of the Ex Libris Society, vol. 7-8, January-December 1897, pp. 108-13.

Other Works Cited

• Brock, Claire. “Gordon, Alice Mary (c. 1850/51-1929).” Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, ProQuest, 2016, p. 681.

• Gordon, Mrs. J. E. H. [Alice Gordon]. “Mary Astell.” The Yellow Book, vol. 9, April 1896, pp. 105-117. Yellow Book Digital Edition, edited by Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, 2010-2014. Yellow Nineties 2.0, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2020. https://1890s.ca/YBV9_gordon_mary/

• Levetus, Celia Anna. Letter to John Lane, 16 July 1895, John Lane Company Records, Harry Ransom Center, MS-02195.

• “Levetus (née Moss), Celia (c1819-18 December 1973), writer.” The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History, edited by William D. Rubinstein, Michael A. Jolles, and Hilary L. Rubinstein, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 570.

• “Our Booking Office.” Review of The Savoy, vol.2, April 1896, and The Yellow Book, vol.9, April 1896, Punch, May 1896, p. 229. Yellow Nineties 2.0, edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2019. https://1890s.ca/savoy2_yb9_review_punch_may1896/

• Review of The Yellow Book, vol. 9, April 1896, The Bookman, June 1896, pp. 372-3. Yellow Nineties 2.0, Edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2019. https://1890s.ca/yb9_review_new_york_times_1896/

• Sebba, Anne Marietta. “Ballin, Ada Sarah (1862-1906).” Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, ProQuest, 2016, p. 128.

• Women and British Aestheticism, ed. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades, University of Virginia Press, 1999.