The Baby's Opera

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.