Cicely Mary Barker"s "Flower Fairies Books", published in the first half of this century, are known and loved around the world. They were created by a quiet, unassuming and dedicated artist, who was nevertheless remarkably successful, spending her life illustrating many children"s books and selling hundreds of watercolours and pastels. Today, twenty years after her death, her work continues to offer delights that have stood the test of time.
She was born in 1895 in Croydon, South London, and spent most of her life there. Because of ill-health she was educated at home and largely taught herself to draw and paint, encouraged by a supportive family and assisted by membership of the Croydon Art Society. She was only sixteen when she had her first work accepted for publication as a set of postcards, and from that time she devoted her career to painting.
It was her Flower Fairies books that brought Cicely Mary Barker her greatest popular acclaim. Like the Pre-Raphaelite painters whom she so much admired, she believed in recreating the beauty of nature in art and in drawing from life. Her plants and flowers are observed with complete botanical accuracy and in the fairies themselves she perfectly captured the unselfconscious grace of young children, whom she used to sketch in her sister"s school. Her Flower Fairies watercolours have a unique combination of naturalism and fantasy which no imitators have matched.
Equally successful were her religious paintings. Possessed of a strong Christian faith and a naturally warm personality, she had a gift for depicting ordinary people"s experiences of joy, innocence or love without sentimentality.
In this book Jane Laing examines Cicely Mary Barker"s life and character, drawing on her worklists and letters and the recollections of relatives and friends. She evaluates the artist"s style and technique, using reproductions of sketches, watercolour drawings, pastels, book illustrations and devotional paintings, many of which have never been published before. They reveal the enormous artistic talent that has enabled Cicely Mary Barker"s work to survive in a more aggressively modern age and to give pleasure to so many admirers. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Cicely Mary Barker and Her Art (Jane Laing)