William Heath Robinson’s illustrated edition of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, published in 1921, is a more substantial collection than the Dulac edition with eleven stories in all. The translator was AE Johnson who notes that three of the tales—Beauty and the Beast, The Friendly Frog, and Princess Rosette—aren’t from Perrault at all, but Beauty and the Beast by this time was part of the general canon.
Robinson’s illustrations in this particular volume are badly damaged in places but they maintain his high standard in their characterisation and use of space. A couple of the pieces are rather alarming in a book for small children: the giant crushing a village while pursuing the fleeing captives in Little Tom Thumb, and Blue Beard (again) threatening his wife with a cutlass. The imperious Puss-in-Boots is particularly good. Browse the rest of the book here or download it here.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Edmund Dulac’s Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales
• Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
• John Austen’s Tales of Passed Times
No criticism of Sime, but I can’t help wondering what Heath Robinson illustrations to Dunsany stories would look like.
I’m sure he would have done a good job although it’s debatable whether he’d achieve the weirdness of some of Sime’s drawings. I find Sime to be a little too whimsical at times but he was weird enough for Lovecraft to mention him in his stories. I’ve never seen anything in WHR that might have appealed in the same way.