Richard Doyle (1824-83)

Richard Doyle, one of the most popular illustrators of the Victorian period, was the son of a painter and caricaturist.  He became a regular contributor to Punch when he was only 19, and drew the cover picture, which was use for more than a century, but left the staff in 1850 because, as a Roman Catholic, he objected to the magazine's attacks on the papacy.  One of his first commissions after going freelance was to illustrate Ruskin's The King of the Golden River (1851).  Some of his most attractive drawings are found in In Fairyland (1870), a series of pictures with a verse-text by William Allingham.  Folklorist Andrew Lang liked the Doyle illustrations so much that he wrote a prose text for the same pictures, and the result of this collaboration was a book entitled The Princess Nobody (1884).  Doyle is not as well known today as other Victorian illustrators for children, but Maurice Sendak, perhaps the most famous illustrator of children's books in America today, has praised his work, saying that Doyle was "probably the best of them all," because of his draftsmanship (Doyle's forms are almost always small, with a kind of mischievous quickness and sharpness to the size), his clever mind, his gorgeous sense of color, and fantastic imagination.

Ruskin's The King of the Golden River (1851) is one of the earliest English examples of a fantasy written specifically for a child (Effie Grey, then 12, whom Ruskin later married).  Ruskin called it "a fairly good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with some true Alpine feeling of my own."   The book proved an immediate success, and went through three editions during its first year of publication. In the first two of these, Doyle's illustrations of the South West Wind depicted his nose as bugle-like, drawn without reserve; this was apparently thought objectionable, and a suddenly prudish Ruskin insisted that the phallic proboscis shown in three illustrations be redrawn.  All of the other protrusions - the conical cap, the enormous feather, the flowing cape, and the extended doorknocker - are however still visible in this Dover reprint.

This slide shows the frontispiece to The Princess Nobody, which Sendak felt was "a parody of Blake with those writhing female figures and little boy angels falling out of flowers."  Sendak also noted that the illustration borders on tacky sentiment with the girls doing a ballet around the pistils.  There is also the "little monster" at the bottom- right out of a Wagnerian opera - tormenting a butterfly. Sendak feels an "insidious purpose" in all this, which he refuses to analyze.

The butterfly teasing - naughtiness aforethought, the enjoyment of mischief - which is depicted here, would have been shocking to any normal child reading a picture book before 1840.  Both of these pages are from a modern reprint, though the original (In Fairyland) was done by means of woodcut engraving colored by Edmund Evans.

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