CRANE, Walter

This charming little book tells of the hidden life and society of flowers, which are depicted as personifications of their chief qualities. For example, the Dandelion is portrayed as a bold knight and the Foxgloves as a happy and curious gaggle of cousins and brothers and sisters.

Originally aimed at young adults, the book retains its appeal because of Crane’s beautiful artwork and his ability to create an enchanted realm.

The book was published in 1899 by Harper and Brothers. It was written and illustrated with coloured pictures by Walter Crane.

Crane often united natural motifs with medieval or folk imagery. Whether in his children’s books or his graphics for the socialist movement, these pastoral, pseudo-historic scenes presented a vision of a utopian society. In A Floral Fantasy, an angel wearing a Phrygian cap - a symbol of revolution - leads the author through a garden in which humanized flowers live in an idealized, medieval society.

Originally aimed at young adults, the book retains its appeal because of Crane’s beautiful artwork and his ability to create an enchanted realm.

The book was published in 1899 by Harper and Brothers. It was written and illustrated with coloured pictures by Walter Crane.

The influence of the pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts movement, concerning artistic practice and political views, is clearly present throughout Walter Crane’s personal life and career as an artist. A Masque for the Four Seasons illustrates the strong influence of the pre-Raphaelites even in the mature work of Crane, the strong use of colour, the heaviness and fall of the draperies and the classical yet medievalised beauty of the personifications of the seasons epitomise the core principles of the movement.

The picture shows two pages from Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp, one of Walter Crane’s ‘toy books’. In these books, Crane introduced new levels of artistic sophistication to the art of illustration. In the 1870s, his designs show the influence of Japanese prints in the use of flat areas of colour and simple, often asymmetrical compositions, and also of classical sculpture in the figures and draperies. They also display the styles and schemes of decoration associated with the emergent Aesthetic Movement.

This is the front page of Beauty and the Beast, one book in a series based on popular fairy tales, illustrated by Walter Crane. Beauty and the Beast was part of the Toy Books series published in the late 1800s. Note the use of a standing Crane to advertise the fact that Walter Crane was the illustrator.

Belle arrives at the castle of the Beast to plead for her father’s life, and the Beast is smitten with her. The elegantly dressed Boar is chatting with the Princess, who is listening to this fantastic Boar talk to her.

Crane’s last outstanding book of illustrations for children was Flora’s Feast (1889). He later worked with William Morris at the Kelmscott Press on wood-engravings for Morris’s The Story of the Glittering Plain (1894) and for Spenser’s ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1894-97); these Gothic images were among his finest works as an illustrator.

The picture shows Crane’s illustration of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. It represents Britomart, a nymph of Greek mythology and the heroine of Book III of The Faerie Queene.

The painting is signed and dated bottom left: Walter Crane 1883.

In this composition, Walter Crane was inspired by the sight of the surf during a trip to America in 1892. The impression of the landscape is personified for him in the mythological figures of the sea god Neptune and his untamed horses, like in B�cklin’s paintings. Crane created several colour schemes for his work in tempera and oil, the first of which he exhibited in the Water Colour Society in the winter of 1892-93.

Walter Crane spent his honeymoon in Italy in 1871. While he was there, he became interested in 15th-century Italian art. For this work, Crane was inspired by Botticelli’s painting Birth of Venus from the 1480s. The compositions are similar. Both show Venus, the Roman goddess of love, emerging from the sea after her birth as a fully-grown woman. Like Botticelli, Crane painted with tempera, a medium made from coloured pigment and egg yolk. At his wife Mary’s request, rather than draw from a female model, Crane used a male model, Alessandro di Marco, for the body of Venus.

Crane’s larger-scale pictures increasingly reveal his belief that art might be used as a metaphor for the human condition. The Renascence of Venus shows both his study of Botticelli and his hope that a new appreciation of beauty in art and decoration was coming about in England.

The illustrations in the limited edition of Shakespeare’s Tempest are by Walter Crane.

During the mid-1860s, Crane evolved his own style of children’s book illustration. These so-called ‘toy books’, printed in colour by Edmund Evans, included The History of Jenny Wren and The Fairy Ship. Crane introduced new levels of artistic sophistication to the art of illustration: during the 1870s, his designs show the influence of Japanese prints in the use of flat areas of colour and simple, often asymmetrical compositions, and of classical sculpture in the figures and draperies; they also display the styles and schemes of decoration associated with the emergent Aesthetic Movement. Among his best-known works were The Baby’s Opera (1877) and The Baby’s Bouquet (1878).

The picture shows an illustration from The Baby’s Opera, a children’s nursery rhyme book with sheet music. The book was printed in colours by Edmund Evans, Publisher, London, New York.

Many of Crane’s allegorical paintings of the 1880s, such as The Bridge of Life (1884) and Freedom (1885; both untraced), suffered from sombre moods and banal symbolism and were criticized on these accounts. The painter’s draughtsmanship became less precise and his treatment of figures crude.

Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She became the queen of the underworld after her abduction by Hades, the god of the underworld, with the approval of her father, Zeus. The myth of her abduction, her sojourn in the underworld and her temporary return to the surface represents her functions as the embodiment of spring and the personification of vegetation, especially grain crops, which disappear into the earth when sown, sprout from the earth in spring and are harvested when fully grown.

In Classical Greek art, Persephone is invariably portrayed robed, often carrying a sheaf of grain. She may appear as a mystical divinity with a sceptre and a little box, but she was mostly represented in the process of being carried off by Hades.

In 1871 Crane married Mary Frances Andrews, and during a protracted Italian honeymoon, he evolved a personal style of gouache landscape painting. He reduced the range of colour and simplified the forms of the landscape to convey the sun-baked but luxuriant character of the Italian countryside.

John Keats (1795-1821) was an English poet prominent in the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He died in Rome aged twenty-five on February 23rd, 1821 and is buried at the Cimitero Acattolico - the so-called Protestant Cemetery in Rome. His grave is beneath the elderly shade trees in the old section of the graveyard, close to the Pyramid of Cestius.

Keats came to Rome in September 1820, already suffering from tuberculosis that would kill him five months later. His gravestone reads: This grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821.

The painting shows the gravestone with the Pyramid of Cestius in the background.

Despite the success of his books, Crane’s principal ambition was as a painter. In 1862 his painting The Lady of Shalott was favourably received at the Royal Academy.

The tile is dominated by two full-length figures on a grassy, flower-strewn expanse with a winding path on the lower half. There is a horizontal design of dense foliage at the horizon line with one tall tree upper proper right. Proper right of the centre is a young female figure in a brown high-waisted dress with short puff-sleeves and a white bodice and wearing a large brown hat. On her right hip, she supports a tan wooden pail, and in her left hand, she supports a simple stool against her left hip. She looks to her left at an old man who bows his head and extends his right hand. In his left hand, he holds gloves and leans on a thin cane. He is dressed in black high boots, white britches, a brown vest, a tan waistcoat, a white collared shirt, and a tall tan hat. His hair is tied with a black ribbon, and he wears pince-nez on a long cord. The sky is pale grey-blue and the landscape is light and dark tan with white flowers. In the upper proper left corner is printed: “WHERE.ARE.YOU. / GOING.TO.MY. /. PRETTY MAID?

The lower proper left corner is the artist’s monogram.

The vase is inscribed Skoal (Cheers!). It was designed by Walter Crane and produced by Man & Cie.

Crane was the personification of the artist-designer: he was a painter, graphic artist, illustrator, and book artist; he designed textiles, glass windows, ceramics, jewellery, and posters. He loved Florentine Quattrocento art, a love he shared with his friend Burne-Jones and was deeply impressed by the coloured woodcuts from Japan.