Walter Crane (15 August 1845 – 14 March 1915) was an English artist and
book illustrator. He, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, are
considered the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the
genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its
developmental stages in the latter 19th century.
Walter Crane (15 August 1845 – 14 March 1915) was an English artist
and book illustrator. He, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, are
considered the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the
genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its
developmental stages in the latter 19th century. His worked featured some of the
more colorful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that
would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to
come. Born in Liverpool, he was part of the Arts and Crafts movement. He
produced paintings, illustrations, children's books, ceramic tiles and other
decorative arts.
Early life and influences
The children of Queen Blondine and sister Brunette picked up by a
Corsair after seven days at sea, from the fairy tale Princess Belle-Etoile.
Walter
Crane was the second son of Thomas Crane, portrait painter and miniaturist. He
was a fluent follower of the newer art movements and he came to study and
appreciate the detailed senses of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was also a
diligent student of the renowned artist and critic John Ruskin. A set of
coloured page designs to illustrate Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" gained the
approval of wood-engraver William James Linton to whom Walter Crane was
apprenticed for three years (1859-1862). As a wood-engraver he had abundant
opportunity for the minute study of the contemporary artists whose work passed
through his hands, of Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett
Millais, as well as Alice in Wonderland illustrator Sir John Tenniel and
Frederick Sandys. He was a student who admired the masters of the Italian
Renaissance, however he was more influenced by the Elgin marbles in the British
Museum. A further and important element in the development of his talent was the
study of Japanese colour-prints, the methods of which he imitated in a series of
toy-books, which started a new fashion.
Paintings and illustrations
In 1862 his picture "The Lady of Shalott" was exhibited at the Royal Academy,
but the Academy steadily refused his maturer work; and after the opening of the
Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 he ceased to send pictures to Burlington House. In
1864 he began to illustrate a series of sixpenny toy-books of nursery rhymes in
three colours for Edmund Evans. He was allowed more freedom in a series
beginning with The Frog Prince (1874) which showed markedly the influence of
Japanese art, and of long visit to Italy following on his marriage in 1871.
The Frog Asks To Be Allowed To Enter The Castle - Illustration For
The Frog Prince, 1874
The Baby's Opera was a book of English nursery songs planned in 1877
with Evans, and a third series of children's books with the collective title
Romance of the Three R's, provided a regular course of instruction in art
for the nursery. In his early "Lady of Shalott" the artist had shown his
preoccupation with unity of design in book illustration by printing in the words
of the poem himself, in the view that this union of the calligrapher's and the
decorator's art was one secret of the beauty of the old illuminated books.
He followed the same course in The First of May: A Fairy Masque by his friend
John Wise, text and decoration being in this case reproduced by photogravure.
The Goose Girl illustration taken from his beautiful Household Stories from
Grimm (1882) was reproduced in tapestry by William Morris.
Flora's Feast, A Masque of Flowers had lithographic reproductions of Crane's
line drawings washed in with water colour; he also decorated in colour The
Wonder Book of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Deland's Old Garden. In 1894 he
collaborated with William Morris in the page decoration of The Story of the
Glittering Plain, published at the Kelmscott Press, which was executed in the
style of 16th century Italian and German woodcuts. Crane also illustrated
editions of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (12 pts., 1894-1896) and The
Shepheard's Calendar.
Crane wrote and illustrated three books of poetry, Queen Summer
(1891), Renascence (1891), and The Sirens Three (1886). Walter
Crane illustrated Nellie Dale's books on Teaching English Reading: Steps to
Reading, First Primer, Second Primer, Infant Reader,
Book I, and Book II. These were most probably completed between 1898
and 1907.
Socialism
From the early 1880s, initially under Morris's influence, Crane was closely
associated with the Socialist movement. He did as much as Morris himself to
bring art into the daily life of all classes. With this object in view he
devoted much attention to designs for textiles, for wallpapers, and to house
decoration; but he also used his art for the direct advancement of the Socialist
cause. For a long time he provided the weekly cartoons for the Socialist organs
Justice, The Commonweal and The Clarion. Many of these were collected as
Cartoons for the Cause. He devoted much time and energy to the work of the Art
Workers Guild, and to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded by him in
1888.
Although not himself an anarchist, Crane contributed to several libertarian
publishers, including Liberty Press and Freedom Press. Following the Haymarket
bombing, Crane made multiple trips to America where he spoke in defense of the
eight anarchists accused of murder.
Mature work
His own easel pictures, chiefly allegorical in subject, among them "The
Bridge of Life" (1884) and "The Mower" (1891), were exhibited regularly at the
Grosvenor Gallery and later at the New Gallery. "Neptune's Horses," was
exhibited at the New Gallery in 1893, and with it may be classed his "Rainbow
and the Wave."
Wallpaper design, 1875
His varied work includes examples of plaster relief, tiles, stained glass,
pottery, wallpaper and textile designs, in all of which he applied the principle
that in purely decorative design "the artist works freest and best without
direct reference to nature, and should have learned the forms he makes use of by
heart." An exhibition of his work of different kinds was held at the Fine Art
Society's galleries n Bond Street in 1891, and taken over to the United States
in the same year by the artist himself. It was afterwards exhibited in the
Germany, Austria and Scandinavia.
Crane became an associate of the Water Colour Society in 1888; he was an
examiner for the Science and Art Department at the South Kensington Museum (now
the Victoria & Albert Museum; director of design at the Manchester Municipal
school (1894); art director of Reading College (1896); and in 1898 for a short
time principal of the Royal College of Art. His lectures at Manchester were
published with illustrated drawings as The Bases of Design (1898) and Line and
Form (1900). The Decorative Illustration of Books, Old and New (2nd ed., London
and New York, 1900) is a further contribution to theory. A well-known portrait
of Crane by George Frederick Watts was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1893.
One of his last major works would be his lunettes at the Royal West of England
Academy which were painted in 1913.
He died in 1915 and was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium where his
ashes remain.
Unauthorized Site:
This site and its contents are not affiliated, connected,
associated with or authorized by the individual, family,
friends, or trademarked entities utilizing any part or
the subject's entire name. Any official or affiliated
sites that are related to this subject will be hyper
linked below upon submission
and Evisum, Inc. review.
Please join us in our mission to incorporate The Congressional Evolution of the United States of America discovery-based curriculum into the classroom of every primary and secondary school in the United States of America by July 2, 2026, the nation’s 250th birthday. , the United States of America: We The
People. Click Here