Walter Crane

1845 – 1915

English painter, graphic artist, illustrator, and designer. He showed artistic inclinations as a boy and was encouraged to draw by his father, the portrait painter and miniaturist Thomas Crane (1808-1859). A series of illustrations to Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott was shown first to Ruskin, who praised the use of colour and then to the engraver William James Linton (1812-1898), to whom Crane was apprenticed in 1859. From 1859 to 1862 Crane learnt a technique of exact and economical draughtsmanship on woodblocks. He concentrated his output from 1864 onwards on book illustration. He joined the Art Worker's Guild in 1884 and became one of the leading figures of the Arts and Crafts Exhibitions Society in 1888. From 1894 onwards he worked for William Morris's Kelmscott Press. Crane's work is strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and also by Florentine Quattrocento art, which he studied intensively during his two journeys to Italy (in 1871 and 1888). He is famous for his illustrations for fairy tales which are reminiscences of Japanese colour prints. For the arts and crafts trade, he designed carpets, wallpaper, embroidery, and majolica tiles. He also made a major contribution to the stylistic development of Art Nouveau as a theoretician.

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