Walter Crane | Precursor of Art Nouveau

Walter Crane (1845-1915) was an English artist and book illustrator.

Together with William Morris, Walter Crane was a leader in the Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts artistic movements

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Walter Crane is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of 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 later 19th century.

Crane's work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come.

He was part of the Arts and Crafts movement and produced an array of paintings, illustrations, children's books, ceramic tiles, wallpapers and other decorative arts.

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 1863 the printer Edmund Evans employed Crane to illustrate yellowbacks, and in 1865 they began to collaborate on toy books of nursery rhymes and fairy tales.

From 1865-1876 Crane and Evans produced two to three toy books each year.

These are a few of his illustration suites:

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 a long visit to Italy following on his marriage in 1871.

His work was characterized by sharp outlines and flat tints.

The Baby's Opera was a book of English nursery songs available 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 done again as a big watercolour and then reproduced in tapestry by William Morris.

Flora's Feast, A Masque of Flowers had lithographic reproductions of Crane's line drawings washed in with watercolour; he also decorated in colour The Wonder Book of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Deland's Old Garden.

During the eighties and nineties he illustrated 16 children's novels by Mrs. Molesworth in black and white.

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 illustrated editions of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1894-1896) and The Shepheard's Calendar, as well as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1873), The Happy Prince and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde (1888), an edition of Arthurian Legends, A Flower Wedding and in 1900 Judge Parry's re-narration of Cervantes' Don Quixote of the Mancha.

Crane also 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 1898-1907. | Source: © Wikipedia

Walter Crane (1845-1915) è stato un pittore ed illustratore Inglese.

Dopo un apprendistato presso lo studio di William Linton, si mostrò inizialmente influenzato dalla corrente pittorica dei Preraffaelliti, e fu successivamente collaboratore e discepolo di William Morris nell'ambito dell'Arts and Crafts Movement.

È considerato uno dei pionieri del Liberty-L'Art Nouveau.

Noto principalmente per le sue illustrazioni di libri per l'infanzia, tra le quali è possibile citare: Il principe ranocchio, La Bella e la Bestia, La bella addormentata nel bosco, Cappuccetto Rosso, Il gatto con gli stivali, Barbablù, Jack e la pianta di fagioli, Princess Belle Etoile e The Robber Bridegroom.

Ha realizzato inoltre opere di grafica, acquerelli, manifesti, disegni per stoffe, carte da parati, arazzi, tappeti, vetrate e gioielli.

Tra le opere pittoriche più importanti è possibile menzionare il Ritratto della Moglie Mary Frances (1882) conservato presso il Museo d'Orsay di Parigi, e i Cavalli di Nettuno (1892) conservato presso la Neue Pinakothek di Monaco.

Per via del suo stile è stato talvolta paragonato al francese Eugène Grasset.