IV Some Children’s-Books Illustrators
Leigh Hunt is one of many authors gratefully to praise the best-praised publisher of any day, Mr. Newbery, who, at “The Bible and Sun” in St. Paul’s Churchyard, dispensed to long-ago children ‘Goody Two Shoes,’ ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ and other less famous little books, bound in gilt paper and rich with many pictures. Charming memories prompt Leigh Hunt’s mention of the little penny books ‘radiant with gold,’ that ‘never looked so well as in adorning literature,’ and if the radiance of his estimate of these nursery volumes is from an actual memory of gilt-paper binding, his words exemplify the spirit that makes right appreciation of the newest picture-books so difficult.
In no other part of the subject of book-illustration are the books of yesterday fraught with charm so inimical to delight in the books of to-day. The modern child’s book—except, let us hope, to the child-owner—is merely a book as other books are. Its qualities are as patent as its size, or number of illustrations. The pictures are to the credit or discredit of a known and realized artist; they are, moreover, generally plain to see as a development of the ideas of some ‘school’ or ‘movement.’ One knows about them as examples of English book-illustration of to-day. But the pictures between the worn-out covers of the other child’s books were known with another kind of knowledge, discovered in a long intimacy, and related, not to any artist, or fashion of art, but to all manner of unreasonable and delightful things.
So it is well, perhaps, that the break between a subject of enthralling associations and a subject whose associations are unsentimental, should, by the ordering of facts, occur before the proper beginning of a study of contemporary illustration in children’s books. For one reason or another, little work by artists whose reputation is of earlier date than to-day comes within present subject-limits. Some, like Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, are dead, some have ceased to draw, or draw no longer for children. Happily, the witching drawings of Arthur Hughes are still among nursery pictures, in reprints of ‘At the Back of the North Wind,’ and its companions—though the illustrator of these books, of ‘The Boy in Grey,’ and of ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays,’ has long ceased to weave his fortunate dreams into pictures to content a child. The drawings of Robert Barnes, of Mrs. Allingham and of Miss M. E. Edwards—illustrators of a sound tradition—are known to the present nursery generation; and so are the outline and tinted drawings of ‘T. Pym,’ who devised, so far back as the seventies, the naïve and sympathetic style of illustration that is pleasantly unchanged in recent child-books, such as ‘The Gentle Heritage’ (1893), and ‘Master Barthemy’ (1896). The later work of Walter Crane is so bent to decorative and allegorical purpose, that the creator of the best nursery-rhyme pictures ever printed in colours—Randolph Caldecott’s are rather ballad than nursery-rhyme pictures—is in his place among decorative illustrators rather than in this connection. Sir John Tenniel’s neat, immortal little Alice, with her ankle-strap shoes and pocketed apron, is still followed to Wonderland by as many children as in 1866, when she and the splendid prototypes of the degenerate jargon-beasts of to-day first captivated attention. The drawings of these artists, and perhaps also of ‘E. V. B.’—for ‘Child’s Play,’ though published in 1858, is familiar to present children in a reprint—are mentioned because of the place they still take on nursery book-shelves. But from such brief record of some among the books ‘radiant with gold’ that ‘never looked so well as in adorning literature,’ one must turn to work that has no such radiance of sentiment and association over its merits and defects.
Since the eighties Mr. Gordon Browne has been in the forefront of illustrators popular with story-book publishers and with readers of story-books. He is the son of Hablot Browne, but no trace of the ‘caricaturizations’ of ‘Phiz’ is in Mr. Gordon Browne’s work. Probably his earliest published work appeared in ‘Aunt Judy’s Magazine’ some time in the seventies. These unenlivening drawings suggest nothing of the picturesque and unhesitating invention that has shaped his style to its present serviceableness in the rapid production of effective illustrations. The range and quantity of his work is best realized in the bibliographical list, which records his illustrations to Shakespeare and Henty, to fairy-tales and boys’ stories, girls’ stories and toy-books, Gulliver, Cervantes, and Sunday-school books, at the rate of six or seven volumes a year. In addition, one must remember unnumbered illustrations in domestic magazines. And, on the whole, the stories illustrated by Gordon Browne are adequately illustrated. It is true that as a general rule he illustrates stories whose plan is within limits of familiarity, such as those by Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. L. T. Meade, or, in a different vein, the boys’ stories of Henty, Manville Fenn, or Ascott Hope. Romance and the clash of swords engaged the artist in the pages of ‘Sintram,’ of Froissart, of Sir Walter Scott, and—pre-eminently—in the illustrations to the ‘Henry Irving Shakespeare,’ numbering nearly six hundred, and representing the work of five years. Illustrating these subjects, though in varying degree, the vitality and importance of an artist’s conception of life and of art is put to the test. So far as prompt and definite representation of persons, places, and encounters, and unflagging facility in devising effective forms of composition constitute interpretation, the artist maintained the level of the undertaking. The illustration of stories such as those collected by the brothers Grimm, or those Andersen discovered in his exile of dreams among the facts of life, demands a quality of thought differing from, yet hardly less rare than, the thought needed to interpret Shakespeare. A fine aptitude for discerning and rendering ‘the mysterious face of common things,’ a fancy full of shapes, perception of the rationale of magic, are essential to the writer or artist who elects to send his fancy after the elusive forms of fairyland. The recent drawings to Andersen, a volume of tales from Grimm, published in 1894, and illustrations to modern inventions, such as ‘Down the Snow Stairs’ (1886), and Mr. Andrew Lang’s ‘Prince Prigio,’ show that Mr. Gordon Browne’s ideas of fairyland, ancient and modern, are no less brisk and picturesque than are his ideas of everyday and of romance. His technique is so familiar that it is surely unnecessary to make even a brief disquisition on its merits in expressing facts as they exist in a popular scheme of reality and imagination. It is a healthy style, the ideals of beauty and of strength are never coarse, wanton or listless, the humour is friendly, and if the pathos occasionally verges on sentimentality, the writer, perhaps, rather than the artist is responsible.
Mr. Gordon Browne draws the average child, and represents fun, fancy and adventure as the average child understands them. His art is unsophisticated. To him, the child is no motif in a decorative fantasy, nor a quaint diagram figuring in nursery-Gothic elements of design, nor a bold invention among picture-book monsters. The artists whose basis of art is the unadapted child, may, perhaps, be classed as the ‘realists’ among children’s illustrators. Among these realists are the illustrators of Mrs. Molesworth—with the exception of Walter Crane, first and chief of them.
Mr. Leslie Brooke succeeded Mr. Crane in 1891 as the illustrator of Mrs. Molesworth’s stories, and the careful un-selfconscious fashion of his drawing, his understanding of child-life and home-life as known to children such as those of whom and for whom Mrs. Molesworth writes, make these pen-drawings true illustrations of the text. His drawings are the result of individual observation and of a sense of what is fit and pleasant, though neither in his filling of a page, nor in the conception of beauty, is there anything definitely inventive to be marked. On the whole, his children and young people are rather representative of a class that maintains a standard of good looks among other desirable things, than of a type of beauty; and if they are not artistic types, neither are they strongly individualized. In his ‘everyday’ illustrations Mr. Leslie Brooke does not idealize, but that his talent has a range of fancy is proved in illustrations to ‘A School in Fairyland’ (1896), and to some imaginings by Roma White. Graceful, regardful of an unspoilt ideal in the fairies, elves and flower-spirits, there are also frequent hints in these drawings of the humour that finds more complete expression in ‘The Nursery Rhyme Book’ of 1897, and in the happy extravagance of ‘The Jumblies’ and ‘The Pelican Chorus’ (1900). Outside the scope of picture-book drawings are the dainty tinted designs to Nash’s ‘Spring Song,’ and the skilful pen-drawings to ‘Pippa Passes.’
Mr. Lewis Baumer’s drawings of children, whether in ‘The Boys and I’ and other stories by Mrs. Molesworth, or in less known child-stories, have distinction that is partly a development of an admiration for Du Maurier, though Mr. Baumer is too quick-sighted and appreciative of charm to remain faithful to any model in art with the model in life before his eyes. The children of Mr. Baumer are of to-day. The effect of the earlier ‘Punch’ artist on the work of the younger man is hardly more than suggested in certain felicities of pose and expression added to those that a delightful kind of child discovers to an observer unusually sensitive to the vivid and engaging qualities of his subject. These children are swift of movement and of spirit, and the verve of the artist’s style is rarely forced, and still more rarely inadequate to the occasion.
The acceptance of a formula, rather than the expression of a hitherto unexpressed order of form, is the basis of page-decoration by members of the Birmingham School, whose work in its wider aspect has already been considered. Originality finds exercise in modifying details, but, pre-eminent over differences in style, is the similarity of style that suggests ‘Birmingham’ before the variations in detail suggest the work of an individual artist. The influence of Kate Greenaway is strongly marked in the work of many of these designers for children’s books. Indeed, Miss Winifred Green’s drawings to Charles and Mary Lamb’s ‘Poetry for Children,’ and to ‘Mrs. Leicester’s School,’ contain figures that, if one allows for some assertion necessary to justify their reappearance, might have come direct from ‘Under the Window.’
The typical illustrative art of Birmingham is, however, of another kind. The quaint propriety of ‘old-fashioned’ childhood, which Kate Greenaway’s delicate pencil first represented at its artistic value, is akin to the conception of the child that prevails on the pages decorated by Mrs. Arthur Gaskin, but the work of Mrs. Gaskin shows nothing of the Stothard-like ideal that seems to have been the suggesting cause of ‘Greenaway’ play-pictures. In the arabesques of flowers and leaves which decorate many pages designed by Mrs. Gaskin one sees a freedom and fluency of line that are checked to quaintness and naïve angularity when the child is the subject. Her conception of a pictorial child is very definite, and in her later work, one must confess, it is a conception hardly corroborated by observation of fact. ‘Horn Book Jingles’ and ‘The Travellers’ of 1897 and 1898 show the culmination of a style that had more sympathetic charm in the tinted pages of the ‘A. B. C.’ (1895), or the ‘Divine and Moral Songs’ of the following year. Book-illustration is with Mrs. Gaskin, as with many members of the school, only a part of craftsmanship.
Miss Calvert’s winsome drawings in ‘Baby Lays’ and ‘More Baby Lays’ are obviously related to the drawings of Mrs. Gaskin, though observation of real babies seems to have come between a rigid adherence to the model. The decorative illustrations by the Miss Holdens to ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ (1895), and to ‘The Real Princess,’ show evidence of fancy that finds expression while nothing of Mr. Gaskin’s teaching is forgotten.
As different in spirit from the drawings of the Birmingham designers as is the Lambs’ ‘Poetry for Children’ from ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses,’ the captivating illustrations of Mr. Charles Robinson seem a direct pictorial evocation of the mood of Stevenson’s child’s rhymes, or of Eugene Field’s lullabies. Familiar now, and exaggerated in imitations and in some of the artist’s later work, the children and child-fantasies of Mr. Robinson, as they were realized in the first unspoilt freshness of improvisation, are among the delightful surprises of modern book-illustration. In the pages of ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ (1896), of ‘The Child World,’ and of Field’s ‘Lullaby Land,’ the frolic babes of his fancy play hide and seek wherever the text leaves space for them, rioting, or attitudinizing with spritely ceremony, from cover to cover. The mood of imaginative play, of daylight make-believe with its realistic and romantic excesses, and of the make-believe enforced by flickering fire-light, and by the shadows in the darkened house, is expressed in Mr. Robinson’s drawings. Not children, but child’s-play, and the unexplored shadows and mysteries that lie ‘up the mountain side of dreams’ are the motives of the fantasies he sets on the page beside Stevenson’s rhymes of old delights, and the rhymes of the land of counterpane, where Wynken Blynken and Nod, the Rockaby lady from Hushaby Street, and all kind drowsy fancies close round and shut away the crooked shadows into the night outside the nursery.
The three books mentioned represent, as I think, the artist’s work at its truest value. There is variety of touch and of method, and the heavier fact-enforcing line of ‘Child Voices,’ of ‘Lilliput Lyrics,’ or of the coloured pictures to ‘Jack of all Trades’ is used, as well as the fanciful line of the by-the-way drawings, and the arabesques and delicate detail of the fantasy and dream pictures. A scheme of solid black and white, connected and rendered fully valuable by interweaving with line, white lines telling against black masses, and black lines relieved against white, with pattern as a resource to fill spaces when plain black or plain white seem uninteresting, is, of course, the scheme of the majority of decorative illustrators. But of this scheme Mr. Charles Robinson has made individual use. Whether his lines trace a fairy’s transparent wing on a background of night-sky, of drifting cloud or of dream mountain-side, or make the child visible among dream-buildings, or seated on the world of fancy in the immensity of night, or passing in a sleep-ship through faëry seas, they have the quality of imagination, imagination in their disposition to form a decorative effect, and in the forms they express. The full-page drawings to ‘King Longbeard’ have this quality, and hardly a drawing to any theme of fancy, whether in old or in new fairy tales, or in verses, but is the result of a vision of charm and distinction.
It would seem that the imagination of Mr. Charles Robinson realizes a subject with more delight when the text is suggestive, rather than impressive with definite conceptions. The mighty forms of ‘The Odyssey,’ the chivalric symbolism of ‘Sintram and Aslaugas Knight,’ even the magical particularity of Hans Andersen, are not, apparently, supreme in his imagination, as is his vision of fairy-seeing childhood. One is unenlightened by the graceful drawings to ‘The Adventures of Odyseus,’ or the romances of De la Motte Fouqué.
That Miss Alice Woodward has, on occasion, made one of the many illustrators who have profited by the example of Mr. Charles Robinson, various drawings seem to show, but few of these illustrators have the originality and purpose that allow Miss Woodward to enlarge her range of expression without nullifying the spontaneity of her work. She has illustrated over a dozen books, beginning with ‘Banbury Cross’ in 1895, and mostly she treats her subject with humour and variety and with a consistent idea of the pictorial aspect of things. She has quick appreciation of unconscious humour in attitude and in expression, though she seems at times to rely too much on memory, thereby diminishing vividness. When most successful she can draw a pleasing child with lines almost as few as those used by any modern artist. Miss Gertrude Bradley is another pleasant illustrator. Her later drawings of children are modified from the print-pinafore freshness of those in ‘Songs for Somebody’ (1893), to a type that has evident affinities with the Charles Robinson child, though in ‘Just Forty Winks’ (1897) Miss Bradley proves her individual sense of humour. The taking simplicity of Miss Marion Wallace-Dunlop’s illustrations of elf-babies in ‘Fairies, Elves and Flower Babies,’ and of the human twins who adventure in ‘The Magic Fruit Garden’ also suggests the influence of the fortunate inventor of an admirable child.
The greater amount of Mr. Bedford’s work for children consists of coloured illustrations to nursery-books, and, when the humour of half-penny paper journalism is supposed to be entertainment for babies, one may be thankful for the pleasant and peaceful drawings of this artist. Little Miss Muffet, Wee Willie Winkie, and the activities of town and country, are a relief from the jeunesse dorée, and the lethargy of the War Office as toy-book subjects, while ‘The Battle of the Frogs and Mice’—though Miss Barlow’s version of Aristophanes, with Mr. Bedford’s effective decorations, is hardly a nursery-book—is a better child’s subject than the punishable pretensions of other nations.
In work hitherto noticed, the child may be regarded as the central figure of the design, whether fact or fancy be set about his little personality. Besides the illustrators whose subject is childhood in some aspect or another, and those children’s illustrators who pictorialize the wide imaginings of the national fairy tales, there are others in whose work the child figures incidentally, but not as the central fact. In this connection one may consider those draughtsmen who illustrate modern wonder-books with Zankiwanks, Krabs and Wallypugs.
Mr. Archie Macgregor should be classed, perhaps, among artists of the child in wonderland, but the personalities of Tomakin and his sisters, though Judge Parry sets them forth in prose and in verse with his usual high spirits, are not the illustrator’s first care. ‘Katawampus,’ ‘The First Book of Krab,’ and ‘Butterscotia,’ have made Mr. Macgregor’s robust and strongly-defined drawings familiar, and, within the limits of the author’s hearty imagination, his droll and unflagging representations of adventures, ceremonies and humours, are extremely apt. Children, goblins, animals and queer monsters are drawn with unhesitating spirit and humour, and with decorative invention that would be even more successful if it were less fertile in devising detail. More fortunate in rendering action than facial expression, without the mystery that is the atmosphere of the magical fairy-land, the fact and fancy of Mr. Macgregor are so admirably illustrative of Judge Parry’s text that one is almost inclined to attribute the absence of glamour to the artist’s strong conception of the function of an illustrator.
Mr. Alan Wright’s work, again, is inevitably associated with the invention of an author, though Mr. Farrow’s ‘Wallypug’ books have not all been illustrated by one artist. Mr. Wright’s drawings are proof of an energetic and serviceable conception of all sorts of out-of-the-way things. His humour is unelaborate, he goes straight to the fact, and, having expressed its extraordinary and fantastic characteristics, he does not linger to develop his drawing into a decorative scheme. Apparently he draws ‘out of his head,’ whether his subject is fact or extravagance. The three small humans who figure in ‘The Little Panjandrum’s Dodo,’ and the ambassador’s son of ‘The Mandarin’s Kite,’ are as briefly sketched as the whimsicalities with whom they consort.
Mr. Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to ‘Two Old Ladies, Two Foolish Fairies, and a Tom-Cat’ (1897), and to ‘The Zankiwank and the Bletherwitch’ show inspiriting talent for nursery extravaganza. The children, whirled from reality into a phantasmagoria of adventure, are deftly and happily drawn, the fairies have fairy grace, and the rout of hobgoblins and grotesques fill their parts. Drawing real animals, Mr. Rackham is equally quick to note what is characteristic, and his facility in realizing fact and magic finds expression in the illustrations to ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ (1900). This is the most important work of Mr. Rackham as a child’s illustrator, and if the drawings are somewhat calculated to impress the horrid horror of witches and forest enchantments on uneasy minds, the charm of princesses and peasant maids, the sagacious humour of talking animals and the grotesque enlivenment of cobolds and gnomes are no less vividly represented. That Mr. Rackham admires Mr. E. J. Sullivan’s scheme of decorative black-and-white is evident in these drawings, but not to the detriment of their inventive worth.
Mr. J. D. Batten, Mr. H. J. Ford, and Mr. H. R. Millar represent, in various ways, the modern art of fairy-tale illustration at its best. Mr. Batten’s connection with Mr. Joseph Jacob’s treasuries of fairy-lore, Mr. Ford’s long record of work in the multicoloured fairy and true story books edited by Mr. Lang, and the drawings of Mr. Millar in various collections of fairy tales, entitle them to a foremost place among contemporary illustrators of the world’s immortal wonder-stories.
Mr. Batten knows the rules of chivalry, of sentiment, humour, and horridness, as they exist in the magical convention of the real fairy-tales, and whether their purpose be merry or sad, heroic or grotesque, he illustrates the old tales of Celt and Saxon, of India, Arabia and Greece with appreciation of the largeness and splendour of their conception. One might wish for more vitality in his women, and think that a representation of the mournful beauty of Deirdre, the passion of Circe or of Medea, should differ from the untroubled sweetness of the King’s daughter of faery. Still one appreciates the dignity of these smooth-browed women, and, after all, the passionate figures of Greek and Celtic epics need translation before they can figure in fairy-tale books. Mr. Batten’s ideas are never trite and never morbid. His giants are gigantic, his monsters of true devastating breed, and his drawings—especially the later ones—are as able technically as they are apt to the occasion.
There can hardly be an existent fairy-story among the hundreds told before the making of books that Mr. Ford has not illustrated in one version or another. The telling-house of every nation has yielded stories for Mr. Lang’s annual volumes; and since the appearance of ‘The Blue Fairy Book’ in 1888, Mr. Ford, alone or in collaboration with Mr. Jacomb Hood, Mr. Lancelot Speed and other well-known artists, has illustrated the stories Mr. Lang has gathered. Moreover, in addition to seven volumes of fairy tales, and many true story and animal story books, Mr. Ford has made drawings for Æsop, for the ‘Arabian Nights,’ and for ‘Early Italian Love Stories.’ His decorative and illustrative ideal has never lacked distinction, and his recent work is the coherent development of that of fourteen years ago, though he has gained in freedom and variety of conception and in quality of expression. Mr. Ford’s art is obviously founded on that of Walter Crane, but he looks at a subject with greater interest in its dramatic possibilities, and in the facts of place and time than the later ‘Crane’ convention admits. An abundant fancy, familiarity with the facts of legendary, romantic and animal life, over a wide tract of country and through long ages of time, fill the decorative pages of the artist with a plentitude of graceful, vigorous and persuasive forms. The well-devised pages of Miss Emily J. Harding’s ‘Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen,’ are akin in form to the drawings of Mr. Batten and of Mr. Ford, though regard for the national tone of the stories gives these illustrations individuality and interest.
The principles of art represented by the drawings of Mr. Ford have little in common with those which determine the scheme of Mr. Millar’s many illustrations. Vierge, and Gigoux, the master of Vierge, are the indubitable suggesters of his style, and the antitheses of sheer black and white, the audacities, evasions and accentuations of these jugglers with line and form, are dexterously handled by Mr. Millar. He has not invented his convention, he has accepted it, and begun original work within accepted limits. A less original artist would thereby have doomed himself to extinction, but Mr. Millar has a lively apprehension of romance, especially in an oriental setting, and interest in subject is incompatible with merely imitative work. Illustrations to ‘Hajji Baba’ (1895), and to ‘Eothen,’ show how dramatic and true to picturesque notions of the East are the conceptions, and the same vigour projects itself into themes of western adventure in ‘Frank Mildmay’ and ‘Snarleyow.’ But his right to be considered here is determined by the rapid visions of fairy romance realized in the pages of ‘Fairy Tales by Q.’ (1895), of ‘The Golden Fairy Book’ with its companions, and on the more concrete but not less sufficient drawings to ‘The Book of Dragons,’ and ‘Nine Unlikely Tales for Children.’
The pen-drawings of Mr. T. H. Robinson in the “Andersen” illustrated by the brother artists, show ability to realize not only the incidents and ideas of the stories, but also something of the national inspiration that is an element in all märchen. At times determinedly decorative, his work is generally in closer alliance with actuality than is the typical work of Mr. Charles or of Mr. W. H. Robinson. Character, action, costume, picturesque facts of life and scenery are suggested, and suggested with interest in the actual geographical and chronological circumstances of the stories, whether a poet’s Denmark, the Arabia of Scheherazade, the Greece of Kingsley’s ‘The Heroes,’ or the rivers and mountains of Carmen Sylva’s stories determine the fact-scheme for his decorative invention. In addition to these vigorous and generally harmonious illustrations, the artist’s drawings to ‘Cranford,’ ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ ‘Lichtenstein,’ ‘The Sentimental Journey,’ and ‘Esmond,’ prove his interest and inventive sense to be effective in realizing actual historical and local conditions. If Mr. W. H. Robinson is also an apt illustrator of legends and of folk-tales, whose setting demands attention to the facts of life as they were to story-tellers in far countries of once-upon-a-time, the more individual side of his talent is discovered in work of wilder and more intense fancy. Andersen’s ‘Marsh King’s Daughter,’ the Snow Queen with her frozen eyes, the picaresque mood of Little Claus, or the doom of proud Inger, are to his mind, and in illustrations to ‘Don Quixote’ (1897), to ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ and especially in the fully decorated volume of Poe’s ‘Poems,’ the forcible conceptions of the text find pictorial expression.
Mr. A. G. Walker, though a sculptor by profession, claims notice as an illustrator of various children’s books, notably ‘The Lost Princess’ (1895), ‘Stories from the Faerie Queene’ (1897), and ‘The Book of King Arthur.’ His pen-drawings are expressive of a thoughtful realization of the subject in its actual and moral beauty. The nobility of Spenser’s conceptions, the remote beauty of the Arthurian legend, appeal to him, and the careful rendering of costume, landscape and the aspect of things, is only part of a scheme of execution that has as its complete intention the rendering of the ‘mood’ of the narrative. These drawings are realizations rather than illuminations of the text, and one appreciates their thoroughness, clearness, and dignity.
Miss Helen Stratton published some pleasant but not very vigorous drawings of children in ‘Songs for Little People’ (1896), and illustrations to a selection from Andersen suggested the later direction of her ability. This, as the copiously illustrated ‘Fairy Tales from Hans Christian Andersen’ (1899), and the large number of drawings contributed to Messrs. Newnes’ edition of ‘The Arabian Nights,’ show, is in realizing themes less actual than those of Nursery Lyrics. A sense of drama in the pose and grouping of the multitudes of figures on the pages of the Danish and Arabian stories, and a sufficient care for the background, as the poet’s eyes might have seen it behind the dream-figures that passed between him and reality, are qualities that give Miss Stratton’s competent work imaginative value.
The work of Miss R. M. M. Pitman comes within the subject in her illustrations to Lady Jersey’s fairy tale, ‘Maurice and the Red Jar,’ and to ‘The Magic Nuts’ of Mrs. Molesworth. But though their decorative intention and technique represent the forms of the artist’s work, the spirit of fantasy that informs her illustrations to ‘Undine’ finds only modified expression. The symbolism of ‘Undine’ is wrought into decorations of inventive elaborateness. The technical ideal of Miss Pitman suggests study of Dürer’s pen-drawing, and though at times there is too much sweetness and luxury in her representation of beauty, at her best she expresses free fancy with distinction not common in modern book-illustration.
Brief allusion only—where drawings of more definitely illustrative purpose over-crowd the available space—can be made to the numerous animal books, serious and comic. Mr. Percy J. Billinghurst’s full-page designs to ‘A Hundred Fables of Æsop,’ ‘A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine,’ and ‘A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals’ deserve more than passing mention for their decorative and observant qualities and their enlivening humour. Another decorative draughtsman of animals for children’s books is Mr. Carton Moore Park, who, since 1899, when the ‘Alphabet of Animals’ and ‘The Book of Birds’ appeared, has published seven or eight volumes of his strongly devised designs. One can hardly conclude without reference to Mr. Louis Wain, the cats’ artist of twenty years’ standing, and to Mr. J. A. Shepherd, chief caricaturist of animals; but while toy-book artists such as Mrs. Percy Dearmer, Mrs. Farmiloe, Miss Rosamond Praeger, Mr. Aldin, and Mr. Hassall (whose subject—the child—takes precedence of Zoological subjects) must be left unconsidered, the humourists of the Zoo can hardly be included.