Walter Crane: His Art and Life through Illustrations

This is where everything started. Walter was talented youngster who managed to create this oil painting as an apprentice at wood engraver William James Linton (1812-1897) who gave him a chance to engrave plates after works of the artists like Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1828-1882) or John Tenniel (1820-1914), so Walter got a chance to learn from the best. When he created The Lady of Shalott, he was only 17 years old.

The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy, dream of every painter in Great Britain, but his true call was in much more down to earth profession - one year later Edmund Evans (1826-1905) employed his as an illustrator of so called yellow books and these two men probably made the most important step in the evolution of children's literature. Let's see few examples!

Crane as an illustrator and Evans as an engraver and a printer made about three picture books every year from 1859 to 1871. We can in these years a picture book as specific media was not only born, but became a product, accessible to masses. So called yellow books and later more quality toy books were sold at train stations and other places with high traffic of possible buyers. High circulation guaranteed low prices and low prices led to higher number of buyers, which led to higher profits. Evans invested them in improved technology and Crane paid more and more attention to the details.

2. The Frog Prince (1874):

A picture book was not a book with pictures anymore, it became a book with standardized number of pages, predictable quantity of full page illustrations, half page images and illustrations in facing pages formats, with text and images mixed into unique graphic results, sometimes on the verge of today's comics and often with original typography, designed specifically for the chosen edition. Of course a cooperation between best illustrator and best printer of the mid-nineteenth century couldn't last forever without crashes. Evans was a great businessman in constant search for additional profit margins and Crane an idealist, who tried to improve every single detail of each of his creations, no matter how much time and money this would take.

Cane became one of the most important artists of Art Nouveau style (another fine example is Anne Anderson as another great illustrator from slightly later times)

More than a decade of fruitful cooperation is much more than majority of cooperations between similarly powerful personalities (read: strong egos) achieved, so we can all be very thankful to get what Crane and Evans had made.

You can buy it on-line, but it's also available for free at one of my favorite resources:

https://archive.org/details/fairyship00cran

And here is another of Crane's by-products: a coloring book, where half of the pictures are colored as Mr. Crane thought they should be and another half is not colored, so you can compare your artistic vision with Crane's.

You can download whole book here:

https://archive.org/details/waltercranespain00cran

If you are in the mood for something more demanding, you can enjoy in Crane's map of British Empire with many details which translated an informative map into artistic work, which can be enjoyed many decades after the facts on the map became useless. By the way, this work, which is in public domain like all others on the page, is already used and abused in thousands of works on the web.

While work for Evans definitely earned him a position among immortals in the field of children literature, this was by no means the only important collaboration with other highly creative minds of his time.

Among others we should mention Mrs. Molesworth, prolific author of books for girls, which bear no specific artistic value today, but were important part of education at the end of 19th century in England. Crane illustrated 16 books for her.

These books are now considered way too conservative (they were written to 'prepare girls for the role of wives'), but they helped to establish new standards in new society where a lot of changing very fast and large percentage of people simply lost the feeling of right and wrong.

While educational works by Mary Louisa Molesworth, masked in fiction, were not of similar quality like works of Dickens or Wilde, they reached their audience and had positive effect in general.