who is afraid of the dark until he is given the sight of the huge benevolent moon from
the safe vantage of Big Bear’s arms. The bears are skilfully anthropomorphised by pose
and human expressions. Their territory is pictured in a sure soft pencil and fluid water
paint, on grainy paper, the whole having a tactile, sensuous quality. In Caldecott style
the visual narrative is not as simple as it first appears, displaying several transtextual
jokes.
Michael Foreman is both a picture book maker as well as an illustrator of modern and
classic texts. The main thrust of his earlier work is political. In The Two Giants (1967),
one called Sam the other Boris, the world is systematically made a sadder place until
they learn to be friends. He later developed this pacifist theme in a satire, Moose (1971).
War and Peas (1974) is a thinly disguised pictorial parable about surplus food enjoyed
by rich nations, and a starving Third World. Mixed media artwork includes a landscape
with giant collages of cakes and jellies, mountainous sponges and chocolate sundae
skyscrapers. He has combined historical writing and autobiographical visual
recollections in his illustrated story, War Boy: A Country Childhood (1989). War Game
(1993) a moving and complex companion volume, set in the First World War, inspired by
and dedicated to his four young uncles who died in the fighting, has multiple sources of
visual and textual information, and a sombre double irony in its title.
Fiona French brings the art of other times and places to the traditional concerns of
picture books. Her virtuosity is demonstrated in, for example, the adaptation of Egyptian
friezes for Huni (1971), witty allusions to seventeenth-century Dutch painting for Hunt
the Thimble (1978), electronic-type graphics for Future Story (1983), a radical version of
Snow White in New York (1986) set in the 1930s, and Ethiopian geometrics lending Noah
an archaic quality in Rise, Shine! (1989).
Jane Hissey’s picture story book texts have satisfying plots with a small central
mystery, and the visual narratives display ingenuity and felicitous details as in Little
Bear’s Trousers (1987). She offers an entirely credible nursery microcosm which is
humorous because it takes itself so seriously—a quality which has echoes of the
Kingdom of Babar. Her crayon medium mimics texture, which has particularly strong
associations for young viewers: soft velvet pile, fur and felt, old worn carpeting,
glistening jam, the gleam on a beady eye.
Shirley Hughes innovates form, using traditional materials. Up and Up (1979) showing
the fantasy adventure of a little girl who wants to fly, demonstrates that with graphic
brilliance, the wordless strip cartoon can sustain complex ideas. Chips and Jessie
(1985) is a multimedia metafictive picture book with a fresh synthesis of words, pictures
and strip cartoon techniques. In one notable passage the story is carried by layout,
picture, narrative text, speech balloons and further written amplification.
Pat Hutchins always has devices to draw in her young beholder, such as running
stories in addition to the main one in the illustrations for You’ll Soon Grow Into Them,
Titch (1983). Her classic masterpiece, Rosie’s Walk (1968), is like a pantomime sketch,
which showed what could be accomplished in the contrast between word and image and
complicity between artist and child; there is one sentence and an ironic visual sequence
in the story of a hen who struts round the farm unaware of the presence of a predatory
fox. Rosie—he’s behind you!
234 TYPES AND GENRES