A R T Where to see the work for free, which print and book to buy.
The Shepheard's Calender
The Shepheard's Calender. Edmund Spenser · Public domain · source

Walter Crane

Public domain1845-1915·English·illustration·Wikipedia ↗

Who

English illustrator and designer, born in Liverpool in 1845 and died at Horsham, West Sussex, in 1915. Apprenticed to the wood-engraver W. J. Linton from 1859 to 1862, he spent his career on picture books, book decoration, wallpapers and textiles, and was a founder of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1888.

Why they matter

With Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway he did much to set the shape and look of the modern picture book. With the printer Edmund Evans, from 1865 they produced two or three toy books a year, flat colour printed from wood blocks, with a look taken from Japanese colour prints that started a fashion. He then carried the same idea of the whole designed page into the Arts and Crafts book, and, as a committed socialist, into weekly cartoons for Justice, Commonweal and The Clarion.

What to buy

The printed books are the originals, and they were made in quantity. Toy books were thin paperbound picture books of a few illustrated pages, sold cheaply and printed by Evans for Routledge in runs that often passed 10,000 copies for a first printing, so Crane's still turn up. They were made to be handled by children, so condition is the whole question: look for bright colour, intact wrappers and no scribbling. The Baby's Opera of 1877, nursery songs with music and one of the more elaborate toy books, is the best single book to own, in the publisher's pictorial cloth. The Kelmscott Glittering Plain is the top tier and priced as a Kelmscott book. Modern facsimiles and poster reproductions of the toy-book pages are cheap and fine to hang; just do not pay period-book money for one. Books: Isobel Spencer's Walter Crane (Studio Vista, 1975), the first major study after his death, and his own An Artist's Reminiscences (1907).

Notes

Public domain. Archive collections include Yale's Beinecke Library and the John Rylands Library in Manchester. His wife, the embroiderer Mary Frances Andrews, died in late 1914; he died three months later.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

National Gallery, London ↗Art Institute of Chicago ↗Tate ↗V&A ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

AbeBooks (Spencer, Walter Crane) ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

Originals

AbeBooks (toy books) ↗AbeBooks (The Baby's Opera) ↗eBay ↗

See also

Paul Gauguin 1848-1903Edvard Munch 1863-1944Gustav Klimt 1862-1918Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944Piet Mondrian 1872-1944Gustave Doré 1832-1883Suzanne Valadon 1865-1938Hilma af Klint 1862-1944

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