Randolph Caldecott

Caldecott, Randolph (British illustrator and painter, 1846-1886)

LC name authority rec. n 50032151

LC Heading: Caldecott, Randolph, 1846-1886

Biography:

Caldecott, Randolph (1846–1886), artist and book illustrator, was born at 150 Bridge Street, Chester, on 22 March 1846, the son of John Caldecott, a hatter and tailor who was also a pioneer of modern accounting, and his wife, Mary Dinah Brookes. He was educated at King Henry VIII School, Chester, where he won a prize for drawing and, despite bouts of rheumatic fever, rose to become head boy. Among his early accomplishments was a talent for caricature and for carving animals in wood. His father, however, intended him for a financial career and in 1861 arranged a position for him in the Whitchurch and Ellesmere Bank in Whitchurch, Shropshire. He did well there and in 1867 was transferred to the Manchester and Salford Bank in Manchester.

Though he was careful and numerate, banking had never been Caldecott's first love. He continued to draw, and was ideally placed when employed in the quiet country town of Whitchurch to observe rural subjects with his keen, attentive eye. He lodged on a farm in these years, and travelled the county to visit farmers, landworkers, and landowners who were the bank's clients. It was from these experiences that Caldecott's knowledge of the forms and behaviour of animals, and of the manners of country people, first reached maturity. He paid particular attention to domestic and agricultural detail, such as furniture, costume, implements, and rural architecture, assimilating a depth and richness of subject matter both in his notebooks and his memory. He took part in fox-hunting, and his experience as a rider and huntsman gave him yet more insight into country practices, which found vivid expression in his later work.

After he moved to Manchester, Caldecott's discontent with banking evolved into action to get himself out of it. He joined the Brasenose Club, a centre of Manchester's cultural life, and over the years 1868–72 submitted drawings to the local weeklies Will o' the Wisp and The Sphinx, many of which were published. He sketched within the city, fascinated by local detail, the comic and the grotesque together, and attended evening classes at Manchester School of Art. Having been given an introduction to the Manchester-born painter Thomas Armstrong, later director of the South Kensington Museum and then living in London, Caldecott took his advice and began to send drawings to London publishers. Armstrong showed Caldecott's work to authors and publishers, including Henry Blackburn, who, from 1871, began to buy them for publication in his magazine London Society. In 1872 Caldecott gave up banking and moved to London to pursue a career as an artist. That year he briefly joined the Slade School to study life drawing under Sir E. J. Poynter, but his central activity was as a news reporter, finding a rich vein of subject matter in the House of Commons, the law courts, the theatre, and public lectures.

Caldecott's wry, anecdotal humour, combined with his characteristically economical use of line, soon brought him an eager following among publishers and readers. His graphic manner—spare, simple lines and forms set onto wide areas of white paper—translated well into wood engraving, and later photo-etching on zinc blocks, and contrasted happily with denser passages of type. This was a calculated and thoroughly considered style, of which he wrote: ‘The art of leaving out is a science. The fewer the lines, the less error committed’ (Blackburn, 126). Caldecott settled in a studio at 46 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, and gradually widened his outlets in working for Punch, The Graphic, and the Illustrated London News. Though becoming successful as an illustrator and a journalist, Caldecott did not neglect his youthful talent for animal sculpture, and in 1873 he worked in the Chelsea studio of the expatriate French sculptor Jules Dalou. In exchange for English lessons, Dalou gave Caldecott modelling tuition, encouraging him to study animals from life, in the London streets, the zoo, and the South Kensington and British museums. Among Caldecott's animal sculpture is the bronze relief Horse Fair in Brittany (exh. RA, 1876), inspired by the Elgin marbles, and gilt capitals of birds in the Arab Hall, Leighton House, London, commissioned by the artist Frederick Leighton, in 1880. From observations of animals and birds in London, Caldecott painted and exhibited decorative schemes and murals, an early example being panels for the dining-room of Bank Hall, near Buxton, Derbyshire (1873).

Caldecott's sunny and cheerful personality endeared him to artists and publishers alike. His obituarist wrote:

The handsome lad carried his own recommendation. With light brown hair falling with a ripple over his brow, blue-grey eyes shaded by long lashes, sweet and mobile mouth, tall and well made, he joined to these physical advantages a gay humour and a charming disposition. No wonder then that he was a general favourite. (Manchester Quarterly, July 1886)

Henry Blackburn encouraged Caldecott to broaden his range as an artist, and the two men travelled in France, Germany, Austria, and Italy together to collect material for collaborative books and articles. In the first of these, The Hartz Mountains (1873), Blackburn published twenty-seven of Caldecott's drawings. Other patrons in London included Captain Frederick Marryat, of whose book Frank Mildmay (1873) Caldecott was the sole illustrator, and the authors Juliana Horatia Ewing and Mrs Frederick Locker.

Caldecott found professional success and security when he illustrated Washington Irving's Old Christmas (1875) with 120 line drawings, and subsequently Irving's Bracebridge Hall (1877) with a similar number of illustrations. These books were early examples of ‘gift books’, publications made to a higher standard of printing, decoration, binding, and tooling than was the commercial norm. They were bought for family libraries by members of the increasingly affluent and numerous middle and upper classes in Britain, and kept for display as much as for reading. Caldecott found himself on a rising wave of demand for such publications, and had the talent and assiduity to help satisfy the market. He also had financial acumen, a product of his years in the bank, and a faith in his own work, preferring to take royalties rather than a fee. The printer Edmund Evans recalled that Caldecott ‘wished to share the speculation—said he would make the drawings—if they sold and paid he would be paid, but was content to bear the loss if they did not sell, and not be paid’ (S. E. Mayer, A Treasury of the Great Children's Book Illustrators, 1983, 98).

When colour lithographic printing developed in the 1870s to become technically and commercially viable for the mass production of books, Caldecott's talents were on hand to take his own art forward into colour printing with John Gilpin (1878) and The House that Jack Built (1878). These were the first of his long series of Caldecott's Picture Books published by Routledge under the innovative direction of Edmund Evans, and selling in great numbers. The series continued in popularity with titles such as Babes in the Wood (1879), The Three Jovial Huntsmen (1880), and Ride a Cock Horse (1884).

The careers of two almost exact contemporaries of Caldecott, Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway, likewise took advantage of the changes in printing techniques, and it is instructive to consider these three artists together. Whereas Greenaway had a childish, rather simpering and fey approach to her texts, and Crane was in tune with contemporary aestheticism, Caldecott touched a nerve of realism and truth in his illustrations. His horses smell, his mud sticks, and while his drawings are appealing and childlike, they are always truthful as to detail. He does, however, share with Greenaway a tendency to set his subjects in a nostalgic late eighteenth-century world, the period in which much of rural Shropshire and Cheshire appeared fixed during his childhood and youth.

Among the many sources for Caldecott's art are the wood engravings of Thomas Bewick and James Cooper, the latter having been instrumental in obtaining the early commission for Caldecott to illustrate Washington Irving. Other influences, which reflect his historicizing tendency, include the works of Thomas Gainsborough, George Morland, and Thomas Rowlandson. In his own century some of his more informal work reflects, none too palely, the compositions and rural sympathies of painters such as Stanhope Forbes and George Clausen. His illustrations were greatly admired by the painters Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, and his influence is visible in, variously, the illustrations of Beatrix Potter, Arthur Rackham, Hugh Thomson and the Brocks, E. H. Shepherd, and Robert Lawson, the illustrator of The Story of Ferdinand (1937). With Walter Crane, a lifelong friend, he developed the practice of unifying the design of children's books, making them interesting and amusing by decoration and layout from the front cover to the back.

Caldecott was elected a member of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours (1882). He exhibited in the institute's galleries in 1883 and 1885, at the Royal Academy (1876, 1878, and 1882), and at the Grosvenor Gallery (1878). In 1879 he bought a house at Kemsing, near Sevenoaks, Kent. He met and on 18 March 1880 married a Kentish woman, Marian Harriet, daughter of Frederick William Brind, a merchant. The couple had no children. The poor health that had dogged Caldecott's childhood affected him throughout his life, but he tended to play down his condition and continued to work at a prodigious pace. One unidentified friend remarked: ‘The quality and quantity of his work done manfully for years under these painful conditions was heroic, and to the anxious enquiries of friends he was always “quite well”, although unable to mount two flights of stairs’ (DNB).

Caldecott was well rewarded financially for his work. His earnings enabled him to travel, and he and his wife spent winters in the south of France or Italy. In the autumn of 1885 the couple travelled to the United States, where he engaged himself in studies of American life and manners for The Graphic. Weakened by a long transatlantic crossing, however, he died, aged thirty-nine, in St Augustine, Florida, on 12 February 1886. There are memorials to him in Chester Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, the latter designed by Alfred Gilbert.

James Hamilton

Sources H. Blackburn, Randolph Caldecott: a personal memoir of his early art career (1886); new edn (1890) · R. K. Engen, Randolph Caldecott, ‘lord of the nursery’ (1976) · M. G. Davies, Randolph Caldecott (1946) · M. Hutchins, Yours pictorially: illustrated letters of Randolph Caldecott (1976) · R. K. Engen, Randolph Caldecott: a Christmas exhibition of the work of the Victorian book illustrator (1977) [exhibition catalogue, Man. City Gall., 13 Dec 1977 – 28 Jan 1978] · N. Finlay, Randolph Caldecott: a checklist of the Caroline Miller Parker collection, Houghton Library, Harvard (1986) · B. Alderson, Sing a song for sixpence: the English picture book tradition and Randolph Caldecott (1986) · Manchester Quarterly (July 1886) · Manchester Courier (16 Feb 1886)

Archives Harvard U., Houghton L., corresp., sketchbooks, etc. :: Ches. & Chester ALSS, letters to Stapleton Caldecott · Harvard U., Houghton L., letters to Frederick Locker-Lampson · Sheff. Arch., corresp. with Julia Ewing · V&A, letters to John Nunnerly

Likenesses R. Caldecott, self-portrait, oils, 1884, Aberdeen Art Gallery [see illus.]

Wealth at death £4594 19s. 3d.: probate, 9 June 1886, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

(James Hamilton, ‘Caldecott, Randolph (1846–1886)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/4365, accessed 20 Oct 2015])