Art: The Good Old Drawings

Illustrators who work for children have a wonderful and enormously responsive public. Their successes are handed down from generation to generation, and are likely to be remembered as being far more magical than they actually were. Their failures simply go out of print and are mercifully forgotten. Most of the remembered artists, and a few of the failures, are crammed into Illustrators of Children’s Books (Horn Book Inc.; $15), a newly published, 527-page history of art for children. A few favorites, like Beatrix Potter and Ernest Shepard (who illustrated Milne’s Pooh books), are represented by just one drawing each.

The illustrations show that art for children reached its peak in 19th Century England. Walt Disney himself would need a lot of film to match the action in Randolph Caldecott’s Panjandrum Picture Book (published in 1885). And Kate Greenaway’s grave little watercolors for Under the Window and Marigold Garden are still as modern—to children’s eyes—as they were when Critic John Ruskin devoted a lecture at Oxford to “The Place of Kate Greenaway in Modern Art.”

“Observe,” said Ruskin, “that what this impressionable person does draw she draws as like as she can. . . . You can’t every day, for instance, see a baby thrown into a basket of roses; but when she has once pleasantly invented that arrangement for you, baby is as like baby and rose as like rose as she can possibly draw them . . . they are blissful just in the degree that they are natural; the fairyland that she creates for you is not beyond the sky nor beneath the sea, but near you, even at your doors.”

Lewis Carroll sketched pretty well, for an amateur, but he preferred not to illustrate his own books. Instead, he kept a critical eye on Artist John Tenniel. He instructed Tenniel not to give Alice “so much crinoline,” and warned that “the White Knight must not ‘have whiskers.” It bothered him that Tenniel never used a model. “Tenniel vows he no more needs one than I should need a multiplication table to work out a mathematical problem. . . .” But in the end it was Tenniel who made Alice’s Wonderland, and the other side of the Looking-Glass, places that everyone sees alike.