Walter Crane Research Articles

Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway (review)

Anne Lundin. Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway. Lanham, MD and London: Children's Literature Association and Scarecrow P, 2001.

Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway. Anne Lundin

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsVictorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway. Anne Lundin Anne Scott MacLeodAnne Scott MacLeod Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Library Quarterly Volume 73, Number 2Apr., 2003 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/603410 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright 2003 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Arthur Hughes, Walter Crane, and Maurice Sendak: The Picture as Literary Fairy Tale

Illustrations, in reinterpreting and extending traditional fairy tales, act as literary fairy tales, adding more images and stories to our culture as they depart from the original source material. Victorian Arthur Hughes through his wood engravings embellished the stories of George MacDonald, as Walter Crane did to Grimm, and both influenced contemporary picture-book artist Maurice Sendak, who copied the look of wood engravings for his versions of Grimm and MacDonald. The restrictions of this improvement over the wood cut created a contrast of light and dark that these artists found appropriate to their readings of Victorian fairy tales.

Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway

Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway

Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway (review)

Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway (review)

Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 (review)

In 1903, a select group of British architects, artists, and designers convened to discuss the influence of a new stylistic trend on international design. The symposium "L'Art Nouveau: What Is It and What Is Thought of It?" sparked heated debate over what many of the participants regarded as a passing continental vogue, lacking the meaning and the aesthetic significance to become an enduring style in Britain. As a result, the comments of forty prominent artists were published in The Magazine of Art in the following year. Walter Crane feared that the new style lacked national relevance, observing that "[n]o style or form of art is of any use unless the designer or decorator has something of his own to say in it." Others held harsher views. Architect C. F. A. Voysey disdained the characteristics of Art Nouveau as a "debauch of sensuous feeling," stating that it was "not worthy to be called a style," while sculptor Alfred Gilbert dismissed the whole movement as "Absolute nonsense" (The Magazine of Art 2 [1904]: 211-12).

Trilby : Fads, Photographers, and "Over-Perfect Feet"

Trilby: Fads, Photographers, and “Over-Perfect Feet” Emily Jenkins (bio) “Trilby was the first great example of how the machinery of promotion, distribution, secondary rights, and social hoopla would work,” claims L. Edward Purcell, speaking of changes in the publishing world that crystallized around the turn of the century. 1 Indeed, George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, illustrated by the author, was—if not the first great example—at least a particularly telling one, because the machinery supporting it worked so exceedingly well. According to some sources, Trilby surpassed all previous records for best-sellers, and certainly it had many reverberations in popular culture—from the Trilby chowder club to the Trilby hats men still wear today. 2 The following case study of the social dynamics of book consumption in the mid-1890s is grounded in responses culled from groups of readers that overlap and intersect with one another: dramatists, reviewers, parodists, product manufacturers, letter writers, photographers, composers, illustrators, mesmerists and ethicists. 3 Trilby’s publication history, and the history of readers’ responses to it in the years following first publication, illuminates how the expanding media machine of the book industry worked, how du Maurier’s pictures contributed to the novel’s success, and what the tale of a model and her artist friends meant for the audience that received it. The Climate Richard Ohmann claims the 1890s as the inaugural moment of an integrated mass culture. As magazines gained mass circulation and more than [End Page 221] doubled their advertising pages, he says, book publishers began thinking in terms of creating hits. 4 And although Ohmann’s claim is rather sweeping, such a climate as he describes was necceessary for a phenomenon like Trilby to happen on the scale that it did. In the years between 1890 and 1914, four elements crystallized together: (1) the emergence of new printing technologies and the new publications that followed, which resulted in a debate as to how books should look and how they should be produced; (2) increasing social literacy in the language of the rapidly multiplying illustrated advertisements; (3) the institutionalization of book collecting and the dissemination of its discourse in print; and (4) changes in the politics of publishing and the distribution of novels. These elements came together in the so-called golden age of British book illustration to create a kind of book that demanded and was produced for a certain kind of social reading—books and behaviors that were not so much new entities as they were fresh mutations of nineteenth-century productions and practices. The most important new technology was the photomechanical reproduction of line drawings, which allowed a bolder, more decisive black line than earlier methods. While the Aesthetes who published the Yellow Book debated the merits of the new means of production with members of the Arts and Crafts movement, the two groups shared the idea that meaning was located in the physical appearance of the book. The 1890s saw the foundation of numerous small and private presses, some of which embraced a return to old-fashioned modes of craftsmanship and others of which celebrated the newly streamlined aesthetic. 5 Meanwhile, on the popular front, book illustration reached its peak in terms of quantity, 6 and the proliferation of small presses coincided with the widespread publication of illustrated magazines, more than sixty of which were in publication over the course of the decade. There was an enormous increase in the number and output of illustrators and there was scarcely a year in which a major monthly magazine was not started. Most important for the illustrator were: The Strand (1891), The Idler (1892), Pall Mall Magazine (1893), Windsor Magazine (1895), and Pearson’s (1896). In addition, weekly magazines such as Black and White and quarterlies such as the Yellow Book provided enormous scope for artists working with photomechanical process. 7 “Nearly every month or so,” complained Walter Crane, “we hear of a new genius in black and white, who is to eclipse all others.” 8 The gift book, or edition de luxe, of the golden age can be said to begin with Aubrey Beardsley’s 1893 Morte D’Arthur, which was produced to rival the productions...

Walter Crane 1845 1915: Artist, Designer and Socialist

Walter Crane 1845 1915: Artist, Designer and Socialist

Ecclesiastical Embroidery, c. 1896 Attributed to Walter Crane

Ecclesiastical Embroidery, c. 1896 Attributed to Walter Crane

Classic Illustrators

Classic Illustrators Joyce Thomas (bio) A Treasury of the Great Children's Book Illustrators, by Susan E. Meyer. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.1983. Ever since those first tantalizing chapbooks were peddled for pennies on the streets of London, the letter "a" has been coupled with the rotund image of an apple and the story of Jack the Giant-Killer linked to its pictorial counterparts of cloud-capped beanstalk, thieving lad, and pursuing Brobdingnagian crashing to earth. Just as children claimed for themselves works such as Robinson Crusoe that were originally written for an adult audience, so did they take over the province of illustrated literature. Somewhere along the line, children's literature became synonymous with illustrated stories, and adult literature retreated to solid print. We may well lament that loss, but one has merely to pick up a book such as The Wind in the Willows, illustrated either by Ernest Shepard or by Arthur Rackham, to experience again the magic and power of words wedded to images. The complementary union of print and picture has become a main criterion by which children's literature is evaluated. Even a weak story if skillfully illustrated seems to metamorphose into a different, stronger work, as shown by Beatrix Potter's less imaginative tales presented alongside those superb watercolor miniatures. And when a good story is well illustrated, the result is a doubly satisfactory experience for the child (or adult). At no other time in history have artists been vouchsafed such technological freedom as they have today in illustrating children's books; given this century's advances in printing and the reproduction of pictures, there seems to be virtually nothing an illustrator cannot technically do. If the latter twentieth century represents the Golden Age of children's book illustration, it does so precisely because the nineteenth century raised the illustration of children's literature to the level of true art. Today's illustrators are the descendants and heirs of individuals such as Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Beatrix Potter, and Kate [End Page 195] Greenaway, who sketched and printed and painted during that other Golden Age of children's literature. In A Treasury of the Great Children's Book Illustrators, Susan E. Meyer reacquaints us with thirteen of those artistic predecessors. The chronological spectrum runs from Edward Lear, born in 1812, to Kay Nielsen, born in 1886. In between come the familiar illustrators John Tenniel, Edmund Dulac, Howard Pyle, Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, Randolph Caldecott, Beatrix Potter, Ernest Shepard, Arthur Rackham, W. W. Denslow, and N. C. Wyeth. As Meyer notes, this baker's dozen represents the classic illustrators who had the most influence on the later illustration of children's books. While most of these artists are associated in some way with the Victorian era, many continued to work until World War I, and several of them witnessed the resurgence of children's literature and its illustration that followed World War II. Decidedly individual in their respective styles, media, and artistic interpretations, they nonetheless share an appreciation of words, a concern with printing techniques, and "the triumph of the imagination, the blend of reality and magic that transforms the written word into something seen and experienced" (8). That transformative gift is clearly—sumptuously—evidenced here in the wealth of illustrations that have been expertly reproduced. The book is a treasure chest of full- and half-page spreads, colored and black-and-white pictures. The selection seems representative of each artist's body of work within the sphere of children's literature. For example, there are twelve full-page color reproductions of Kay Nielsen's stylized, evocative paintings—five from In Powder and Crinoline, five from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, two from the unpublished A Thousand and One Nights —as well as three reduced black-and-white pictures. Arthur Rackham's versatile, fantastic art is reproduced in ten full-page color and eight black-and-white pictures. All his major works are represented: Aesop's Fables, Mother Goose, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Cinderella, The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows. Overall, each illustrator's work...

My Work as a Children's Illustrator

My Work as a Children's Illustrator Charles Keeping A few years ago I was asked to give a talk in a place called Bassingstoke, in Hampshire in England, and I was all ready to go in the morning. I used to have a calendar—the sort that hangs on the wall and when you pull the date off each morning, underneath is a little moral for the day. This morning I tore it off, and the moral was, "When everything has been said completely about a subject, be sure that some fool will stand up and say something more." I feel a bit that way today about the subject of children's books. There have been reams written and spoken about it, and I don't know what one can add to what has been said before. I feel that the best thing one could do, really, is to talk about one's own personal attitudes toward it. Walter Crane, the nineteenth-century illustrator, said that if cave paintings, the large cave paintings, were the beginnings of painting generally, then the everyday life depicted on the handles of the tools men used were the illustrations. I like to think that's what my personal illustrations have always been about. They've been about what I know and what I see and what I have enjoyed, and probably what I have been frightened of. Now I was born in Lambeth. I don't suppose anyone here knows it, but there is a very famous song called "Lambeth Walk" written about it. It's by the river and it's an area of small, mainly Victorian and Georgian, houses with small gardens. The people there were the "poor but honest" sort, and my family was part of what I can only describe as comfortable working class. We certainly weren't poor—there was much poverty around us, but we weren't poor ourselves—and we had a large household, full of aunts, uncles, goodness knows who else. We were terribly spoiled, my sister and I, and we were encouraged to create, to do everything: singing, reciting, talking. You had to tell a story every time you came home; if you didn't they wondered what was wrong with you; they thought you were ill. My grandmother always delighted in saying, "Now what have you done today?" and it had to last half an hour. She would laugh at all the appropriate moments and cry at all the appropriate moments and make your story interesting. Incidentally, she also told very, very lengthy stories herself, and you had to listen to those, too. My grandfather was a merchant seaman. He'd been to sea for forty years, he knew the Far East and Australia long before there was a Panama Canal, and he told stories of the sea. All these things were very stirring and very exciting to me as a child. Of course, my own vision as a child was not so broad. One only saw what one experienced oneself, and when it comes to my own actual work later in life, I tend to keep within what I could see as a child. That was mainly a small garden, a fence, and a large black wall. Against that black wall many things took place. It was a yard which had cart horses, and I would see these vast shapes of horses moving across this wall. These very simple images attracted me, I know, as a very small boy. And I used to like the cats and the birds and things that came into the yard and sat on the flowers. This was an exciting, tiny world to live in. I also enjoyed being taken into that yard next door and sat on the backs of cart horses. This was a very, very exciting thing for a child. It had an element of fear, because the animals were so large, and it had a feeling of almost sensuous comfort because the horses were furry and warm. When I got back home, I used to draw those horses and what I had seen in that stable. The feeling was that by drawing it...

Mr. Ruskin and Miss Greenaway

Mr. Ruskin and Miss Greenaway Michael Patrick Hearn (bio) In 1878, with the publication of her unpretentious collection of verses and pictures titled Under the Window, Kate Greenaway became a household name. As her chief rival Walter Crane explained, "The grace and charm of her children and young girls were quickly recognized, and her treatment of quaint early nine-teenth-century costume, prim gardens, and the child-like spirit of her designs in an old-world atmosphere, though touched with conscious modern 'aestheticism,' captivated the public in a remarkable way."1 This reclusive spinster suddenly became the confidante of poets and princesses. She was lionized and parodied in the press. Greenaway boys and girls appeared (often without the artist's permission) on porcelain and pewter, on toys and wallpaper. Her simple style of dress, derived in part from the Empire period, became the rage in the late Victorian age, and for once Paris in coining the term Greenawisme looked to London for inspiration in fashion. Being as popular in the New as in the Old World, Kate Greenaway was credited with dressing the children of two continents. This illustrator had no greater champion that John Ruskin, the most influential English art critic of the day. He was enchanted by Under the Window, and he at once wrote her an eccentric letter of great praise: "I lay awake half (no, a quarter) of last night thinking of the hundred things I want to say to you—and never shall get said!—and I'm giddy and weary, and now can't say even half or a quarter of one out of the hundred. They're about you,—and your gifts—and your graces, and your fancies, and your—yes, perhaps one or two little—tiny faults."2 He wanted to know if she believed in fairies, in ghosts, in principalities or powers, in Heaven. "Do you only draw pretty children out of your head?" he persisted. "In my parish school there are at least twenty prettier than any in your [End Page 22] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 23] book . . . they are like—very ill-dressed Angeli. Could you draw groups of these as they are?" She was touched by this enthusiasm and treasured the opinions, both the good and the bad. They soon became fast friends, discussing possible collaborations, perhaps a new edition of Beauty and the Beast or a book on botany (he sent her "sods" for nature studies). Most of these suggestions, however, came to nothing. He invited her to visit him in his country home, where she found much to admire: "Such wild wide stretches of country and then such mountains—such mossy trees and stones—such a lake—such a shore—such pictures—such books—my mind was entirely content and satisfied."3 Why did the great defender of Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites devote so much time and energy toward the promotion of Kate Greenaway's humble art? Her appeal was in part nostalgic; she knew him when he was recalling his childhood, during the writing of his autobiography Praeterita. Clearly the author of Modern Painters had altered his aesthetics. He who once defended Turner against accusations that the landscape painter had hurled "hand-fuls of white, and blue, and red, at the canvas, letting what chanced to stick, stick," now attacked Whistler's nocturnes as "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."4 Ruskin had long been known for his unorthodox opinions of art; for example, he argued that George Cruikshank's illustrations for German Popular Stories (1823 and 1826) of the Brothers Grimm "are the finest things, next to Rembrandt's, that . . . have been done since etching was invented."5 Ruskin was now growing old. To many of his colleagues he had become, as the American expatriate called him, "the Peter Parley of Painting."6 In these later years, Ruskin suffered from recurrent bouts of madness. His mind had never fully accepted his loss of faith and the renunciation of narrow Puritanism for humanism. More significantly he had fallen in love with a girl thirty years his junior. Rose LaTouche was only nine years old when...

Randolph Caldecott, 'Lord of the Nursery' , and: Walter Crane as a Book Illustrator (review)

Randolph Caldecott, 'Lord of the Nursery' , and: Walter Crane as a Book Illustrator (review)

Boston Artists and Craftsmen at the Opening of the Twentieth Century

THE Art Workers Guild in London, founded in 1884 as a body of handicraftsmen and designers in the arts, was described by its third Master, Walter Crane, as a true fellowship of the Arts, men of all crafts meeting on a common ground. None is before or after the other. After my first visit to one of its meetings at 6 Queen Square in Bloomsbury on January io, 1974,1 noted in my journal that had seldom met so many congenial and like-minded people in any single room; that I felt that had found my way into catacombs

A LETTER OF WALTER CRANE

Journal Article A LETTER OF WALTER CRANE Get access F. C. MORGAN F. C. MORGAN Hereford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 19, Issue 9, September 1972, Pages 334–335, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/19-9-334 Published: 01 September 1972

American Sheaves from "C. R. A." and Janet Ashbee

ing a good deal of attention lately. In the last few years a spate of books on William Morris, the founder, have appeared. A very fine showing of drawings and sketches of Charles F. A. Voysey was recently assembled at the gallery of the University of California, Santa Barbara, by David Gebhard, who also wrote a catalogue and analysis of Voysey's work. A helpful book on Charles Rennie Mackintosh by Thomas Howarth has been published. And our British cousins are at work on other leaders of the movement, such as Walter Crane, A. H. Mackmurdo, and W. H. Lethaby. It is about time! The Arts and Crafts Movement is the miss-

Drawings by Walter Crane

Drawings by Walter Crane

Hungarian bibliography

Hungarian bibliography Get access Walter Crane Walter Crane Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s11-III, Issue 60, 18 February 1911, Page 131, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s11-III.60.131c Published: 18 February 1911

II.—A Treatise on Gold and Silver. By Walter Crane Ph.D., pp. 727 + x, with 20 illustrations and 9 plates. New York, John Wiley & Sons; London, Chapman & Hall, 1908. Price 21s net.

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The Art of Walter Crane

The Art of Walter Crane