Walter Crane's The Rosebud and Other Tales (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood)

(Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood):    • Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood   Music: "Water Diamonds" (Ann Sweeten) piano Jose Mª Armenta G-P    / tauce67   Arthur Kelly's The Rosebud and Other Tales -- 1909: The Rosebud; "Spring had come" The Lump of Coal; The Lawn Tennis Ball; The Mirror; Soap Bubbles; and The Little Animal. These tales were written by Arthur Kelly and he commissioned Walter Crane to illustrate his vanity publication in 1909. Crane produced twenty-one illustrations in total, of which twenty were used. ........ Walter Crane (Liverpool, Lancashire, 15 Aug.1845 - Horsham, Sussex, 14 March 1915 Walter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children's book creator 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 latter 19th century. His 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 and other decorative arts. Walter Crane was born in Liverpool, England on 15 August 1845, the second son of Thomas Crane, a 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. 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 and 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. He was also a Vice President of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, a movement begun in 1890, whose aim was to promote the loose-fitting clothing, in opposition to "stiffness, tightness and weight". They produced numerous pamphlets setting out their cause, including one entitled 'How to Dress Without a Corset' which Crane illustrated. In December 1914 Crane's wife Mary was killed by a train. The couple had been married for forty-four years and Crane was devastated by her death. Walter Crane died three months later in Horsham Hospital, West Sussex, on 14th March, 1915. His body was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium, where his ashes remain. He was survived by three children, Beatrice, Lionel Francis, and Lancelot.