Walter Crane
Illustrator and Arts and Crafts ideologue.
Walter Crane designed children's books, wallpapers and textiles and was the first president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1888. Like Morris, he held socialist ideas about art for everyone.
Walter Crane was born in Liverpool in 1845, the son of a portrait painter. The family moved to London, and at fourteen he was apprenticed to the wood engraver William James Linton. There he learned printmaking and drawing for reproduction, which shaped his entire career as an artist.
From the mid-1860s he worked with the printer Edmund Evans on cheap, colour-printed picture books for children, known as toy books. They became very popular and made him famous. He drew inspiration from Japanese woodblock prints with their clear outlines and flat areas of colour. His books include The Baby's Opera of 1877, and in the 1890s he illustrated Spenser's The Faerie Queene. He is regarded as one of the great innovators of children's book illustration.
Crane also designed wallpapers, textiles, ceramics and stained glass and painted allegorical oil paintings. The Horses of Neptune of 1892, in which the foam of the waves turns into horses, is in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. He wrote books on design, including The Bases of Design and Line and Form, and was briefly principal of the Royal College of Art around the turn of the century.
He became one of the leaders of the Arts and Crafts movement and was the first president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, founded in 1888, which gave the movement its name. Like William Morris, he was a socialist. He drew pictures and posters for the labour movement, including for May Day, and his images circulated in trade union papers all over Europe.
Crane died in 1915. He was much admired on the Continent, where his exhibitions were shown in several countries, and he influenced the illustrators of Art Nouveau. His picture books have been reprinted many times, and his political imagery lives on in trade union banners and posters.