Artist research - Randolf Caldecott

December 03, 2021

For my illustrator research I chose Randolf Caldecott. He was born in 1846 in England and his love of horse-riding gave him a lot of opportunity create drawings which he later used as inspiration. His firs drawings were published in Illustrated London News in 1861 when he wrote an account of the fire and added his own illustrations to it. As an adult he pursued artistic interests by attending Manchester School of Arts, he publishe his illustrations in newspapers while working for a bank and had his picture hung in The Royal Manchester Institute. He resigned from banking and moved to London to devote his full attention to art where he became a successful magazine illustrator. In 1878 he published his first children’s book which proved to be a great success and he continued to do so until he died. His style was partly a result of him not wanting to replicate the style of his contemporary, Walter Crane whose work was decoratve and flowery. His own work was consider to have much more movement, freedom and life. One of his most famous works is Nursery Rhymes which sold 867.000 copies by 1884. He died at the age of forty in1886 in the USA (Kosik, 2018). Caldecott’s illustrations are very different form my own but the energy and movement he conveys are some of the thing I would like to start introducing in my drawings.