Walter Crane

Walter Crane
Walter Crane, c. 1886
Born	(1845-08-15)15 August 1845 Liverpool, Lancashire, England
Died	14 March 1915(1915-03-14) (aged 69) Horsham, West Sussex, England
Occupations	Book illustrator Artist
Movement	Arts and Crafts movement Socialist
Awards	Albert Medal (1904)
Signature

Walter Crane (15 August 1845 – 14 March 1915) was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation^[1] 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. Crane is also remembered for his creation of a number of iconic images associated with the international socialist movement.

Biography

Early life and influences

Crane was the second son of

From the early 1880s, initially under William 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 and wallpapers, and to house decoration; but he also used his art for the direct advancement of the Socialist cause. As a member of the Socialist League, he created the 1885 cover illustration for their manifesto. For a long time he provided the weekly cartoons for the socialist organs Justice, Commonweal and The Clarion. Many of these were collected as Cartoons for the Cause.

Crane also devoted much time and energy to non-political societies, such as the

Although not himself an anarchist, Crane contributed to several libertarian publishers, including Liberty Press and Freedom Press. He is credited with the design and decoration of the front façade of "The Bomb Shop", Henderson's bookshop at 66 Charing Cross Road specializing in left-wing and radical literature.^[7]

Crane was controversial in his support of the four Chicago anarchists executed in 1887 in connection with the Haymarket affair. Visiting the United States for the first time in connection with an exhibition of his work in 1891, Crane scandalized polite society by appearing at a Boston anarchist meeting and expressing the opinion that the Haymarket defendants had been put to death wrongfully.^[8] Returning to his hotel, Crane found a letter stating that he faced "hopeless ruin" among American patrons of the arts owing to his support of those who were commonly considered to be terrorist conspirators in public opinion of the day.^[8] Financial support was withdrawn and planned dinners in Crane's honour were cancelled.^[8] In response to the controversy, Crane wrote a letter to the press explaining that he had not meant to cause insult and did not himself favour the use of explosives, but had merely been expressing his principled opinion that those convicted were innocent of the crime for which they were charged.^[8] The incident was memorialized in the press as "probably the most dramatic episode" in the artist's career.^[8] Crane publicly criticised the British government for the Second Boer War and joined the Stop the War Committee.^[9]

Personal life

Walter Crane married embroider Mary Frances Andrews in 1871^[10] and they proceeded on a two-year honeymoon. In Italy, the newlyweds made contact with artists from other countries, while Crane's illustrations were published in England.^{[citation needed]} The couple went on to have three children with Crane featuring himself, his wife and one of their sons in his 1885 watercolour, The Apotheosis of Italian Art.^[10][11] Both he and his wife enjoyed giving enormous costume parties, so that the couple's New Year parties were considered a major event in London's artistic social calendar.^[12] In 1914 at the age of 68, Frances Crane went on a rest cure in Kingsnorth, Kent, but committed suicide in a tragic train incident. The coroner's jury ruled it to be a case of temporary insanity.^[12]

Death and legacy

Walter Crane died on 14 March 1915 in Horsham Hospital, West Sussex, three months after his wife. His body was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium, where his ashes remain. He was survived by three children, Beatrice, Lionel and Lancelot.^[12]

Artistic work

Paintings and illustrations

In 1862, his picture The Lady of Shalott was exhibited at the

These are a few of his illustration suites: In 1864 he began to illustrate a series of sixpenny toy books of

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 and 1907.

Poetry

Crane wrote and illustrated three books of poetry, Queen Summer (1891), Renascence (1891), and The Sirens Three (1886).^[5]

Stained glass

Crane's earliest stained glass window designs were some American commissions with glass made by

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.^[5]

His varied work includes examples of plaster

In 1887, Crane was commissioned by Emilie Barrington to paint a series of murals to decorate the newly constructed Red Cross Hall in Southwark, a project conceived by the housing campaigner Octavia Hill.^[20] Crane produced designs for nine panels, which were displayed at the 1890 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society show. Ultimately, only three designs were converted into full-size murals, these being: Alice Ayres (1890), depicting the heroine of the Union Street fire which had occurred in 1885 just a few streets away;^[21] Jamieson (1892), depicting two Scottish railway workers, Alex Jamieson and his nephew Alexander, who lost their lives in 1874 while working on the Glasgow and Paisley line;^[22] and Rescue from a Well (1894), depicting George Eales, a 58-year-old labourer who in December 1887 at Dummer, near Basingstoke in Hampshire, descended into a well to rescue a five-year-old child. After 1894, no further murals were created, partly due to shortages in funding and other commitments, but also because it was discovered that the gas lighting in the hall was damaging the paintings.^[23] The Red Cross Hall is now in private hands and the status of the murals is unknown.

A large mosaic, The Sphere and Message of Art, designed by Crane, was intended for the façade of the Whitechapel Art Gallery at the time of its construction in 1898. Sadly, sufficient funds were not forthcoming, resulting instead in a frontage clad in buff terracotta tiles. (The drawing still exists.)

Crane was much admired in Hungary and in 1900 Radisics Jenő [hu], the director of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts, organised a retrospective of his work there. Crane visited the city in the autumn, was feted, gave lectures and visited Transylvania. He went to Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca), Bánffyhunyad (now Huedin), and Kalotaszeg (now Țara Călatei) in search of Hungarian traditional art. He recorded the visit in Ideals in Art. Zsuzsa Gonda in her review of Crane’s visit says that it is one of the most extensively documented events in the artistic life of the country in that period. The welcome extended to him was not entirely personal, however: he was the representative of England, the nation that sheltered Kossuth and took him to its heart.

One of Crane's last major works was his lunettes at the Royal West of England Academy, which were painted in 1913.

Gallery

• 
  oil on canvas

  , 1862
• 
  Ruth and Boaz, oil on canvas, 1863
• 
  La belle Dame Sans Merci, oil on canvas, 1865
• 
  The Frog Asks To Be Allowed To Enter The Castle – Illustration for the Frog Prince, 1874
• 
  Diana and Endymion,

  watercolour and gouache

  , 1883
• 
  The flowers masquerade as people. Sir Jonquil begins the fun, illustration from A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden, 1899
• 
  King Midas with his daughter, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1893 edition of A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys^[24]
• 
  Illustration for

  Aesop's fables^[25]
• 
  Illustration for

  Little Bo Peep

  , c. 1885
• 
  "Little Red Riding Hood Meets the Wolf in the Woods"
• 
  "The children of Queen Blondine and sister Brunette picked up by a Corsair", from the fairy tale Princess Belle-Etoile, 1884
• 
  The Swan Maidens, 1894
• 
  Comic-like illustration for "Puss in Boots" from The Marquis of Carabas' Picture Book^[26]

Works

• Cartoons for the Cause 1886–1896 London: Twentieth Century Press, 1896 (revised version 1907).
• Line and Form. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1900.
• Moot points; friendly disputes on art & industry between Walter Crane & Lewis F. Day. London, B.T. Batsford, 1903
• An Artist's Reminiscences. New York: Macmillan, 1907.
• William Morris to Whistler. London: G.Bell and Sons, 1911

See also

• Royal West of England Academy

Footnotes

1. ^ Delaney, Lesley (November 2010). "Walter Crane: A revolution in nursery picture books". Books for Keeps (185): 4–5. Archived from the original on 8 April 2019. Retrieved 11 November 2010.
2. ^ Crane, Walter (1907). An Artist's Reminiscences. New York: Macmillan. pp. 1–5.
3. ^ Konody, Paul G. (1902). The Art of Walter Crane. London: G. Bell & Sons. p. 22.
4. ^ Chisholm 1911, pp. 366–367.
5. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h} Chisholm 1911, p. 367.
6. ^ The Sanitary Record, W. H. Allen & Co, July 1890
7. ^ Groves, Reg: Against the Stream. International Socialism (1st series), No. 57, April 1973, pp. 22–24.
8. ^ ^{a b c d e} "The Reminiscences of a Socialist Artist," Current Literature, vol. 43, no. 6 (Dec. 1907), pp. 637–641.
9. ^ "Stop the War Committee". The Manchester Guardian. 3 February 1900. p. 10.
10. ^ ^{a b} "Mary Frances Crane (née Andrews) as Laura; Walter Crane as Cimabue - National Portrait Gallery". www.npg.org.uk. Retrieved 1 September 2023.
11. ^ "The Apotheosis of Italian | Art Walter Crane (1845–1915) | Manchester Art Gallery". Art UK.
12. ^ ^{a b c} "Walter Crane's Home in Kensington". victorianweb.org. Retrieved 1 September 2023.
13. ^ "Historical Children's Literature Collection". University of Washington. Retrieved 28 February 2010.
14. ^ "Illustrated Books by Walter Crane" (PDF). National Gallery of Canada. 2007. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 July 2011. Retrieved 1 March 2010.
15. ^
    ISBN 978-1-84573-473-2
    .
16. ^ "Login". Retrieved 4 October 2014.
17. ^ Victorian Web retrieved 3rd Jan 2022
18. ^ Historic England retrieved 3rd Jan 2022
19. ^ Stuart Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, University of London Press, 1970, p. 294.
20. ISBN 978-1-4411-0665-0
    , p. 69
21. ^ John Price, Everyday Heroism: Victorian Constructions of the Heroic Civilian, pp. 72–77.
22. ^ John Price, Everyday Heroism: Victorian Constructions of the Heroic Civilian, pp. 77–79
23. ^ John Price, Everyday Heroism: Victorian Constructions of the Heroic Civilian, p. 79.
24. ^ "From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division". Retrieved 4 October 2014.
25. ^ "From the Rare Book and Special Collections Division". Retrieved 4 October 2014.
26. ^ Crane, Walter; Martin, Sarah Catherine; Kean, Elizabeth d'Hauteville (1874). The Marquis of Carabas' picture book : containing Puss in Boots, Old Mother Hubbard, Valentine and Orson, The absurd ABC. London; New York : George Routledge and Sons.

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Crane, Walter". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 7 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 366–367.

Further reading

• Stefan Arvidsson, Socialist Style and Mythology. Socialist Idealism 1871-1914. Routledge, 2017.
• Helen Stalker, From Toy Books to Bloody Sunday: Tales from the Walter Crane Archive. Whitworth Art Gallery, 2009.
• Morna O'Neill, 'Art and Labour's Cause Is One': Walter Crane and Manchester, 1880–1915. Whitworth Art Gallery, 2008.
• Morna O'Neill, Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875-1890. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
• John Price, Everyday Heroism: Victorian Constructions of the Heroic Civilian. Bloomsbury, 2014.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Walter Crane.

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Walter Crane

• Catharine T. Patterson Collection of Walter Crane. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
• Walter Crane Collection. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
• Walter Crane Archive at the
  John Rylands Library
  , Manchester
• Walter Crane (1845–1915), Indiana University
• Works by Walter Crane at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Walter Crane at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about Walter Crane at Internet Archive
• Works by Walter Crane at Toronto Public Library
• Works by Walter Crane at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works at Open Library
• Walter Crane Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New on Project Gutenberg
• "Archival material relating to Walter Crane". UK National Archives.
• "Walter Crane Design for "Illustrations of the Victorian Series and Other Wall-Papers"". Paintings & Drawings. Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
• Pierre Bonnard, the Graphic Art, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Crane (see index)
• Baby's Own Aesop From the Collections at the Library of Congress