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Randolph Caldecott
(1846 - 1886)
Randolph Caldecott, together with Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway (see below),
formed the triumvirate of great British children's illustrators of the late
Victorian period. He was born in Chester, and hints of the Cheshire and
Shropshire countryside, churches, manor houses, and farm buildings, appear in
many of his drawings, as well as rural people and animals. The settings of
his picture books were, however, usually idealized late eighteenth century.
As a person Caldecott seems to have had a natural sweetness and gaiety of
spirit. His style had resemblances to both Crane and Greenaway (he knew
them both well), but his drawings were far less rigid than Crane's and far more
humorous than Greenaway's. Nothing like them had been seen before in
children's books. Where Crane had initiated the concept of the decorated
children's book - a unified design from cover to cover - Caldecott created a new
kind of picture book for children. A single story stimulated many
associations, ideas that Caldecott set down on the page as they came to him in a
series of spontaneous lightning sketches. He enlarged the story by interpreting
the words with his pictures. The illustrations fill in what the words
leave out, and the words fill in what the pictures leave out -both closely
interwoven, each enhanced by the other. Caldecott carefully planned the rhythm
of picture to text, so much so that they remind us of music, "as if
the words are a musical refrain propelling the pictures to dance (Meyer)."
Caldecott's comic drawings attracted the attention of the engraver and printer
Edmund Evans, who was keen to issue a new cheap series of children's books, and
in 1878 he and Caldecott began an immensely fruitful collaboration, which almost
immediately secured Caldecott a permanent place in the front rank of
illustrators. For each Christmas during a period of eight years, Caldecott
an Evans (with Routledge as publishers) produced two picture books, printed
largely in color. For a text Caldecott usually chose a nursery rhyme or a
piece of eighteenth-century light verse or nonsense. Evans allowed him to
spread himself very freely, so that there were sometimes only three or four
words to a page; the drawings varied from casual, almost impressionistic
monochrome sketches (and Caldecott preferred sepia ink) to whole pages of color
in which the reader's eye was constantly drawn to some new detail. Evans
recounted Caldecott's working methods:
Shilling Toy Books, at that time, generally had blank pages at the back of the
pictures: I proposed to have no blanks at all in these books: these slight
illustrations were little more than outlines, but were so racy and spontaneous,
R. C. Generally drew them from his friend where a man was wanted: His cats,
dogs, showed how thoroughly he understood the anatomy of them. If the sketches
came all right - he let them pass - if he was not satisfied with the results he
generally tore them up and burned them. (as quoted in Engen)
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One of the first two of these Caldecott-Evans books was
John Gilpin (1878). John Gilpin was a ballad written by William Cowper,
first published in 1785.
Gilpin, a London linen-draper, sets off to celebrate his wedding anniversary at
an inn outside London, but his horse bolts, carries him past his destination
where his wife is waiting, and takes him all the way to Ware where its owner
lives. No sooner has he arrived than the horse takes fright at a braying
ass and carries him all the way home again. Caldecott's designs for this book
(and others in the series) were unique. Unlike Walter Crane's designs
which relied heavily on ornate design and classically inspired figures,
Caldecott 's designs were based upon supreme control of line; of the
twenty-eight illustrations in John Gilpin, only six were full-page color plates,
while the remainder were brief sketched vignettes scattered throughout the text.
Both text and vignettes were printed in brown ink. The book was also
unique for its two double-page color illustrations, one of which (slide 101) was
later used to decorate the face of the Caldecott Medal, awarded annually since
1938 for the most distinguished American picture book during the previous year.
The ducks, geese and dogs in this and other plates in the book were praised by
both Van Gogh and Gauguin for their life-like qualities. Indeed, in
Caldecott's sequential arrangement of the wings of the birds we can see how he
was endowed with a sense of lively animation.
Caldecott also did traditional book illustrating, though neither in the drawings nor in their engraving do we find anything, which is above average in its class. Jackanapes (1879) by Juliana Ewing, is the story about a boy whose father is killed at the battle of Waterloo, and who grows up to die himself on some unspecified battlefield, saving the life of a friend
