illustration was the use of silhouette: it was to be found in works as diverse as Rudyard
Kipling’s illustrations to his own Just So Stories (1894), W.Heath Robinson’s edition of
Hans Andersen’s tales, and Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to C.S.Evans’s retelling of
Cinderella (1919).
European contributions came from Hoffman, and Wilhelm Busch, whose Max und
Moritz cartoons were to influence a wide range of later illustrators. From the USA,
Howard Pyle was important on both sides of the Atlantic at the end of the century,
together with his pupils Maxfield Parrish and Jessie Willcox Smith.
There were indeed many prolific and competent artists working for the children’s
market in the decades before the First World War, besides those who catered more for
the luxury trade. Interestingly, most of their work was done in black and white, though
their range within this limitation was quite remarkable. Among such artists was
H.J.Ford, who provided the illustrations for Andrew Lang’s widely read twelve colour
fairy books, which began with The Blue Fairy Book in 1889 and ended with The Lilac
Fairy Book in 1910. Norman Ault and the Brock brothers were also working in the early
decades of the century along similar lines, while an artist of rather greater stature and
imagination was Leslie Brooke, whose Johnny Crow’s Garden, published in 1903, was
deservedly popular. Having noticed at the beginning of this chapter the influence of
continental artists on British book making, it is interesting to note at this period some
examples of influences working in the opposite direction. This was especially true of
Maurice Boutet de Monval, whose books were influenced by Greenaway, although his
colours are more sutle, and he has a charming sense of humour. He in turn greatly
influenced the work of Henriette Willebeek Le Mair, a Dutch artist, with her flat pastel
colours and rather flat ornamental pictures. Her work was very popular in the first
decades of the twentieth century, especially accompanied by nursery rhymes, and
several of her books have been recently reprinted.
In the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century there were
almost as many women illustrators as men; notable were the Scot Jessie M.King, Anne
Anderson, Jessie Wilcox Smith and Mabel Lucie Attwell. But the immediate future lay
with what was almost a throw back to an earlier style. The work of William Nicholson,
Cecil Aldin and John Hassall carried with it overtones of the chapbook style of the
1890s. Simple masses and flat colours, set on a spacious page, were quite striking when
they first appeared, as we can see in such work as Nicholson’s An Alphabet (1898) and
Aldin and Hassall’s Two Well-worn Shoe Stories (1899). It was to some extent this
simpler style which was to appeal to the book makers of the 1920s and 1930s, though
all too often these lacked the courage to allow the use of blank spaces which had
contributed so much to the success of the earlier artists’ work. But the 1914–1918 war
made a break which though not immediately apparent in the children’s books of the
1920s, soon asserted itself, and a new era of children’s book illustration began to
develop.
Further ReadingAlderson, B. (1986) Sing a Song for Sixpence: the English Illustrative Tradition and Randolph
Caldecott, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the British Library.
226 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ILLUSTRATED TEXTS AND PICTURE BOOKS