metaphor, and of intertextuality. Painterly styles, new graphic materials and means are
reproduced on the picture book page through the advances of print technology;
examples may be found of expressionism, symbolism, surrealism, romanticism, pop art
and of techniques as varied as cloissonisme and collage. Themes includes most matters
of life and death, from an individual viewpoint to the survival of the planet. The
pedagogic role of the picture book has been extended to include its use to create readers
and to help literary and aesthetic development.
By the mid-1920s the characteristics of the modern picture book begin to take shape
in Europe and America. William Nicholson, with Clever Bill (1926) and The Pirate Twins
(1929) pioneered the use of offset colour lithography. Picture and narrative are unified
by paralleling events, and by the line of his assured drawings and handwritten script.
Edward Ardizzone’s Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain (1936) is also an early example
of offset litho, which gives the images a softer effect than the earlier method of printing
directly onto the paper. The handwritten script ebbs and flows against, around, above
and below the sketchily drawn water colour illustrations, which at times tilt with the
tide. Suspense is built into the turn of the page. Little Tim’s limitless energy is caught in
gestural poses, and his staying power was such that his series of adventures lasted
until the 1960s.
A rich use of colour glides into the picture book through Kathleen Hale’s soft waxy
crayons in a series which began with Orlando the Marmalade Cat: A Camping Holiday
(1938). With the freedom of its layout, the inventive ways of showing different events
happening simultaneously over the picture plane, and the punning details, Hale’s
picture books look fresh even today. The adventures of Little Tim, Orlando and Babar
(see below) were all originally printed in books of folio size giving a sense of substance to
the characters.
A deepening of the treatment of themes is also apparent. Jean de Brunhoff made his
six Babar picture books between 1931 and 1937 with themes which explore family
relationships as well as political ones. In the Peaceable Kingdom of Babar, an
enterprising elephant, the welfare of everyone is important, goodness triumphs, and
death is presented and accepted as a natural part of life. Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson
took a pacifist stance with their picture book about a bull who preferred flowers to
fighting, in The Story of Ferdinand (1936). Against the political background of Europe at
the time, Ferdinand was a subversive model for children. The most meticulous comic
strip, Hergé’s Tintin series, began in 1929, showing sustained, well plotted pictorial
stories, while the adventures of Rupert the Bear, founded by Mary Tourtel in cartoon
form (1920) were reissued in annual form a decade later and given a multimedia story
telling layout, page by page. The structure of these two forms are combined, reworked
and expanded for the modern picture book.
Mass produced semi-educational picture books appeared in the 1930s in Russia,
France and Germany, and were designed with the intention to delight as well as to
instruct children. The English extension of these movements came through Puffin
picture books, founded under the editorship of Noel Carrington in 1941.
In the 1930s, the American picture book became increasingly colourful, innovative,
and diverse. Publishers had at their disposal an enormous number of fine artists
including many immigrants. Wanda Gág, with her Millions of Cats (1928), combines a
THE MODERN PICTURE BOOK 229