One of my very favourite childhood books (admittedly, I have a lot of favourite childhood books) is a picture book called Blue Bird, which my parents gave me for my birthday when I was five. The story is a simplified version of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird and is wonderful, but what makes this book special is the beautiful, beautiful pictures. I loved it so much I devoted not one but two Puffin Club bookplates to it.
(Illustration of one of the secret rooms in the Palace of the Night, from Blue Bird, OUP 1976; from here)
(Madam Berlingot, from Blue Bird, from here)
(The Fairy Bérylune, from Blue Bird, from here)
If you are a child of the 1970s like me, you will almost certainly have recognised the unique style of the illustrations even if you don’t remember the name of the artist. He was Brian Wildsmith, and although he died in 2016 today is his birthday and he would have been ninety years old. Tamsin Rosewell (@autumnrosewell) and James Mayhew (@mrjamesmayhew) are organising a Twitter celebration (#wildsmith90) so I thought I’d add something here, as a tribute to one of the greats of illustration. I have drawn on his Wikipedia entry as well as other sites and interviews to which I’ve linked.
Brian Wildsmith was born in 1930 in Penistone, West Riding. He went to school in Sheffield and at seventeen, determined not to follow his father down the mines, studied at the Barnsley School of Art, from where he won a scholarship to the Slade in London. During his time there (1949–52) he was something of an outsider, unable to afford oils and canvas so spending his lunchtimes drawing and studying the Old Masters in the National Gallery. In 1955, after his National Service (he taught music at the Royal Military School of Music), he got married, started teaching art at Selhurst High School and began designing book jackets for John Murray and drawing line illustrations for publishers including Faber and Faber and Oxford University Press.
(Brian Wildsmith at work; photograph from his obituary in the Guardian by Julia Eccleshare)
Wildsmith was foremost a painter and loved colour, and it was his great good fortune that the 1960s saw enormous improvements in colour-printing technology. His other piece of great good fortune was Mabel George, of Oxford University Press, who gave him his first chance to illustrate a children’s book in colour. Mabel George was a brilliant editor who took over the children’s department of OUP in 1956 and also launched the careers of Charles Keeping and Victor Ambrus as well as many writers. As an experiment, she commissioned Wildsmith to illustrate the Arabian Nights (1961). The TLS review savaged it:
‘We now descend to the lowest depths with Brian Wildsmith's vicious attack on the Arabian Nights [...] these pointless scribbles, which do duty for drawings, wander aimlessly about the page[...]’
Mabel responded magnificently:
‘Take no notice, Brian. We make up our own minds here. We’re now going to do an ABC.’
Brian Wildsmith’s ABC went on to win the Kate Greenaway Award in 1962 and his career was made. (I learnt about Mabel George, who was a truly impressive person, here.)
But according to this lovely interview he gave to Joanna Carey in the Guardian, that horrible review remained engraved on Wildsmith’s heart for ever.
(Illustration from Fishes, OUP 1968; from here)
In 1971, Wildsmith and his family – he had four children – emigrated to France with a grand piano and settled in a house in an olive grove in the south. The Blue Bird, my beloved picture book, was published in 1976. It sprang from an invitation Wildsmith received from George Cukor two years earlier: Cukor was going to film Maeterlinck’s play in the first ever US/Soviet co-production in cinema: would Wildsmith like to design the sets and costumes? I had never even heard of this film which apparently was a flop; a pity, but still it gave rise to this marvellous book.
Wildsmith was prolific: he published 82 books, mainly with OUP. Many of them he wrote himself, despite initial reservations which he expressed to Mabel George. In an interview for the Independent, he told Susie Mesure:
‘I said, “But Mabel, my English is terrible. I always got terrible marks at school.” But she said, “Brian, I have editors with inkpots full of full stops and commas. It’s ideas that count and you’ve got them.” And it took off from there.’
I have a couple of other books he illustrated, which I also love very much:
(Illustration of Mother Goose from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, OUP 1964; from here)
(Illustration from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, from here)
(Illustration from The Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Edward Blishen, OUP 1963; from here)
Looking at his pictures on the internets, I recognise others that we must have borrowed from the library:
(Birds, OUP 1967; from here)
(The Lazy Bear, OUP 1973; from here)
His use of colour is striking; it can be bold or subtle, but he’s also acutely aware of pattern and uses patchwork a lot in his pictures of houses and landscapes. The colours can be very intense but are often balanced by large areas of white space. You can see the influence of 1960s psychedelia in some of his work too. The other very striking element is the texture of his pictures. They are very painterly, and again vary from thickly laid swirls and dabs to delicate washes and splashes, given extra clarity by the pencil drawing beneath, embellished with waxy strokes of pastel or layers of collate. When you look at his pictures, they are alive and joyful.
As they sing, he is big in Japan, where a museum dedicated to his work was opened in 1994 and in 1996 he illustrated Katie and the Dream Eater, written by Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamodo of the Japanese Imperial Family. But he is not so big in the UK and many of his books remain out of print; perhaps today’s celebration will go some way to rectifying that.
(Illustration from Wild Animals, OUP 1967; from here)
In the Guardian interview with Carey, Wildsmith said this, which seems a good note to end on:
‘Children are all-important, and so is art ... Art is food for the soul. And books are a child's first encounter with art so I felt it was a way I could make a contribution to the world. A drop in the ocean maybe, but picture books offered a chance to communicate the importance of things such as kindness, compassion, friendship, beauty.’
(from The Lion and the Rat, OUP 1963; found here)
EDITED TO ADD: fellow Wildsmith fans, there is a new website devoted to his work here! His son has also set up a Twitter account, @brian_wildsmith, and you can see all the pictures posted by readers in celebration of his birthday if you follow the hashtag #wildsmith90. Joy!