Children's literature critic Perry Nodelman observes, “[W]hen most people think of books for children, they think first of picture books. . . Not only is the picture-book story the most common form of children’s literature, but it’s a form of storytelling almost exclusively reserved for children.”  (Pleasures, 215) Economic reasons, along with changes in the types of narratives being written,  have made it rare for adult novels to have extensive illustration in the 20th century, so much so that illustration has come to be seen as alien to “serious” adult fiction:

“Can you imagine illustrations in modern novels?”  said Charlotte. . . “For instance, in Norman Mailer?  They would have to be abstracts.  Don’t you think?  Sort of barbed wire and blotches?”

(Alice Munro, “The Albanian Virgin”)

Historical Background

        Telling stories with pictures is probably as old as telling stories with words, and certainly older than telling stories in writing.  Arguably, writing itself is a way of using pictures to tell a story, as we can see by looking at Egyptian hieroglyphics.  Some of the hieroglyphs have already begun to become abstract symbols, while others remain small images (of owls, hawks, etc.).  Our alphabet developed through various stages from such pictorial writing.  Hieroglyphs and conventional pictorial representation often coexisted in tomb paintings, as here and in the next slide.
        Pictorial methods of storytelling and conveying information have continued to coexist with written methods.  In the Middle Ages, for instance, written documents were duplicated by hand, a time-consuming process that meant that books were rare objects; this didn't matter all that much, since relatively few people were literate.  The stained glass, carving and other decorations on medieval cathedrals and churches were a way for the people of those times to learn and remember the stories of the Bible.
        The hand-copied books of the Middle Ages were extensively decorated.  Initial letters of sections of a text were illuminated - i.e., they were enlarged, decorated with brilliant colors and visual flourishes, and often contained small pictures.  The borders of many medieval manuscripts were also decorated with small pictures and elaborate frames.  Many books contained separate pictures in addition to those adorning the text.
         In the later Middle Ages, books were also hand-copied for wealthy individuals, who were able to afford to pay for such expensive luxuries.  These books, which consisted for the most part of devotional texts (Books of Hours) or psalms (Psalters), contained illuminated letters, illustrations from Bible stories, and portraits of the apostles, of saints, or – in some cases – of the owner of the book.  Walter Crane, a Victorian illustrator who greatly admired the medieval world, described these little books as “. . . not only a prayer-book, but a picture-book, a shrine, a little mirror of the world, a sanctuary in a garden of flowers.” (33)
        Illustrated printed books began to appear in the late 15th century, in Germany and Italy; previously, some books had been published from woodcuts, with text and illustration all carved on a single block.  Early type-printed books were illuminated by hand and simulated hand-done books from the pre-printing press era; however, this was very expensive (Hofer 271-72).
        Although many early printed books, like the Gutenberg Bible, relied on hand-colored illuminations, others quickly integrated the new printing (using movable type for the letters) with the older woodcut tradition.  The quality of art created for these books may be indicated by the fact that woodcuts from such artists as Albrecht Durer (Apocalypse, 1498) and Hans Holbein the Younger (Dance of Death, 1524) were frequently removed from the books in which they appeared to be sold as prints (Hofer 284).  Another early technique was etching, in which the lines of the picture were cut into a copper plate with acid.  In either case, ink was spread over the carved illustration and applied to the paper.
         While illustration and other pictorial decoration were commonly used in early printed books, such books tended still to be directed at adult readers, rather than children.  This reflects both the great expense of the books compared to today's costs, and the fact that relatively few child readers yet existed - to some extent, the development of more widespread literacy was an effect of the introduction of mechanical printing, rather than a stimulus for it.  However, some books had a particular appeal to children - for example, translations of Aesop's Fables were available in print early on (the first English translation printed was that by William Caxton in 1484).
        What is often considered the first book for children (and the first picture book) was the Orbis sensualium pictus of John Amos Comenius (1658; English translation 1659), a visual encyclopedia of the world of knowledge in his time (the title may be translated as "The World in Pictures"). Unlike some later writers of books for children, Comenius showed life as it was, complete with negatives such as war and disease (Hunt 7).   Each page of Comenius’s book featured a block print and text identifying elements within the picture.  In some ways, it was like a modern alphabet book.  The combination of block prints with informative material remained a standard for children’s primers for two centuries after Comenius.
        Comenius was “first and foremost an educational reformer and a campaigner of education for all”; it was in this context that he created the Orbis Pictus.  His educational method emphasized “observation of the actual world – contrary to the purely abstract method of teaching that prevailed.  Children whose minds had been crammed with facts that bore no relation to their everyday lives could relate to Comenius’ little book, with its attractive woodcuts.” ( Cotton 6)
        By the 18th century, economic circumstances had changed in that there were many more potential readers, and enough middle-class children who could read (and whose families could afford to buy books for them) to sustain a market in children's books.   The children’s book publishing industry that began to emerge was influenced by the philosophy of John Locke, who argued that children’s minds were tabula rasa – blank slates – upon which experience wrote.  Books written specifically for children were designed to fill up these slates with useful information and moral precepts.  The more successful children’s books managed to combine this pedagogic purpose with entertaining stories, and were typically illustrated with block prints – e.g.,Goody Two-Shoes, published by John Newbery, considered the first publisher to specialize in children’s books.
        This economic transformation was also accompanied by new theories of art and literature.   Writers were concerned with creating a detailed verbal picture, and artists were interested in conveying a story through their paintings.  Thus, greater integration of text and picture was achieved by illustrators such as Hogarth (Holtz 317), whose illustrations were heavily narrative and who conceived of himself in relation to previous authors, not other painters (Holtz 319).
        This convergence could sometimes create difficulties for artists and writers, however.  One illustrator wrote to Sir Walter Scott that the greater the "painterly" detail contained in the text, as in Scott's elaborate descriptions, the "more difficult to paint from, for you have embodied your own ideas and presented them to the mind so completely that little is left for the pencil to perform." (Pantazzi 589)
         Block prints and etching seem very limited in comparison with modern photographic methods of reproduction.  Nevertheless, they could produce very beautiful illustrations and stunning effects, especially when combined with hand coloring.  Perhaps the most consummate book artist of the 18th century was William Blake, a printer, engraver, and poet who maintained complete control over the publication of his own poetry.  He overcame an inherent problem with copper engraving – the inability to print text and illustration on the same plates – by etching poem and illustration together to achieve maximum integration of picture and text.  Blake hand-colored each copy of his work, which he often bound only at the time of sale, resulting in a variety of colored forms for individual pictures.
        Crane described Blake as “a designer of a very different type. . . [who was] distinct, and stands alone” (110).  Because he wrote the poems as well as rendering the illustrations, he “gained the great advantage. . . of harmony between text and illustration.  They become a harmonious whole, in complete relation.” (113)  Gordon Ray says of Blake: “no great artist has ever been more completely committed to illustration.”  Blake was committed first of all to drawing as the basis of all representational art: “he who thinks he can Engrave, or Paint either, without being a master of drawing, is a Fool.  Painting is drawing on Canvas, & Engraving is drawing on Copper, & nothing Else.” (Ray 7)
         While Blake’s work (both in poetry and art) has steadily gained adherents in the two centuries since it was produced, it remained fairly obscure during his lifetime.  A more influential engraver was Thomas Bewick, who lived from 1753 to 1828.  Bewick’s chosen method of engraving was the wood cut, which had declined during the 18th century because of the superior resolution possible with copper engraving.  Bewick revived wood cuts by cutting on the close-grained end of hard wood rather than on the side of the board, as his predecessors had done, and by using the engraving tool to remove the line, rather than paring away everything but the line.  Bewick also developed shading effects through varying the height of the block (to get fainter printing) (Lundin 32).These innovations made it possible to get extremely fine detail with wood cuts.
         Ray says of Bewick: “He did not think of it as a white space on which black outlines and solids made a linear design printed in relief. . . . Instead he began with a black void out of which the subject appears in a varying range of grey tones with pure white for the lightest parts” (33).  This technique was so successful that its practitioners dominated the field for the first third of the 19th century, when wood engraving in books boomed (35).
        In the 19th century, it was still fairly common for writers to create text to accompany pre-existing pictures, but this created tension between writers and artists (Pantazzi 586), best exemplified by Dickens' relationship to "Phiz" in the creation of Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers.  Although Dickens began as the author of written sketches to accompany Phiz's sporting prints, the relative importance of text and picture shifted as Dickens entertaining stories became popular.  Many books for adults as well as for children continued to contain illustrations throughout the century.
         In the early 19th century, "Peter Parley" (New England's Samuel Griswold Goodrich) and his followers (including other writers who adopted the same pseudonym or variations of it) produced works for children that were strenuously devoted to teaching moral principles or useful knowledge.  Struwwelpeter, by the German writer Heinrich Hoffmann, is an extreme example of morally didactic children's literature, although it gained considerable popularity among children themselves because of its brightly colored illustrations and over-the-top punishments.  (For example, the little girl who plays with matches is completely burned up, leaving only ashes; the little boy who won't eat his soup ends up wasting away to nothing.)
         Many picture books in the early 19th century, like those by "Peter Parley," were illustrated with "competent but small wood engravings" (Hunt 88), which remained the standard, despite some increased technical skill at the process, until the 1840s.  In 1842, however, Sir Henry Cole, under the name of "Felix Summerly," began to publish "The Home Treasury" of children's books, including fairy tales, etc. Cole was very concerned about visual quality and hired first-rate illustrators.  His first few publications were hand-colored, but then he turned to color printing of the illustrations -- one of the earliest instances of this technology in children's publishing (Hunt 89).
         The art of illustration also received a boost in the 19th century from the proliferation of illustrated magazines, which produced a steady market for commercial artists and engravers (Ray 97).  Some of the most famous illustrators began their careers as periodical artists, as was the case with Sir John Tenniel, well-known for his caricatures of politicians, like this one of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.  In the 1860s, Tenniel was selected to illustrate a new book by an obscure Oxford professor, Charles Dodgson – better known today as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass.
        During the last half of the 19th century, children's book illustration was of "extraordinarily high quality" (Hunt 163).  In part, this resulted from the development of mechanical color printing; the period also saw the development of toy books ("picture-books in stiff paper covers, often of well-known poems or stories retold but reduced in size to provide more scope for pictures") (Hunt 164).
        Beginning in the 1870s, printer/packager Edward Evans (1826-1905) worked with three outstanding illustrators to create the modern picture book, with brightly colored pictures accompanying the text. Collectively, Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway “elevated the picture book to a perceived status as a work of art” through their craftsmanship (Lundin 1).  A contemporary critic (William Henley) wrote in 1881 that “Art for the nursery has become Art indeed” (Lundin 2).
        Evans himself had apprenticed as an engraver/printer with one of Thomas Bewick’s students, and he developed new processes for applying photography to the preparation of wood blocks; his technique could use as many as nine separate blocks, one for each color, to produce a single illustration.  While time-consuming, the process made possible “delicately printed illustrations that resemble watercolors and challenge even the results of modern technology” (Lundin 8).
        The first of the Evans artists to arrive was Walter Crane  (1845-1915), today the least known of the three to the general public, although in his own time arguably the most influential (Lundin 59).  He developed a philosophy of illustration that  considered “The page of a book. . . as a flat panel which may be variously spaced out.” (Crane 42)
         Crane began illustrating children’s books anonymously in 1865, then in 1874 began to illustrate a “Shilling Series” of toy books.  He initially drew directly onto the block, then later produced drawings which were transferred to wood using a photographic process; however, “his own background in engraving enabled him to work within the limitations of the medium” (Lundin 66).
         The next of Evans’s protégés was Randolph Caldecott (1846-86), for whom the annual award given to the best American picture book is named.  Caldecott began his career as an illustrator doing sketches for travel books and for American newspapers, and really established himself through his illustrations for reissues of Washington Irving’s works, for which his romantic evocations of “Merry Olde England” were ideally suited (Lundin 125).  (“Caldecott presented an essentially English landscape, with memorable scenes and redolent images recalled.” (Lundin 148)) His first children’s picture books appeared in 1878 [just eight years before his death] and were produced in cooperation with Edmund Evans (Lundin 129).  The first two books (The House that Jack Built and Jack Gilpin) remained his best known and most popular works (Lundin 132).  His children’s books represent a change in style, from the more detailed cross-hatching of his earlier work to “terse, sharply defined outline figures” with solid-colored fills (Lundin 133-34).  One of his critics characterized Caldecott’s style as “the art of leaving out,” following the principle that “the fewer the lines, the less error committed” (Lundin 148).   Once begun, Caldecott maintained a pattern of producing two picture books annually until his death (Lundin 134).
         The third Evans artist was Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), for whom the English equivalent of the Caldecott Medal is named.   “Kate Greenaway’s picture books, with their winsome girls and boys dressed in quaint eighteenth-century bonnets and breeches, took London by storm in the fall of 1879” creating what has become known as the “Greenaway Vogue” (Lundin 167).  In part her popularity resulted from the endorsement of John Ruskin, the most influential art critic of the time, who was particularly impressed by the nostalgic world view, with no industrial artefacts intruding on the scenes (Lundin 196).
         Greenaway began her children’s illustration career in 1879 with Under the Window, a collection of verse written by Greenaway herself, though her poetry was considered weak by reviewers (Lundin 172).  This was her most famous work; other notable books include Mother Goose (1881), which was a difficult publishing job because Greenaway insisted on an unusually textured paper for antique effect, which affected the color reproduction (Lundin 177).   In 1888 she produced a famous edition of Robert Browning’s Pied Piper.
        Between 1890 and 1914, new heights were achieved in color printing as the four-color process was developed, allowing the reproduction of delicate water colors.  These illustrations were often printed on a thinner, glossy paper than the text, then hand-placed into the book (Hunt 182).
         The next great illustrator from this period was Arthur Rackham, who combined a powerful line with precise coloring and featured "an almost Gothic delight in the grotesque, the gnarled and twisted" (Hunt 182).
         Around the turn of the 20th century, a new form of illustration began to appear in newspapers, especially in the United States – the comic strip.  Eventually, newspaper strips were gathered together and published as cheap books – the origin of the comic book.  Comic books eventually evolved into a major publishing industry for children, producing monthly titles in fantasy and humor, including what has become the most recognizable form of “comic” book, the superhero story.
        Comic-book style has subsequently been adopted for various other uses.  For instance, Bruce Degen and Joanna Cole employ a recognizable comic-book format for their groundbreaking Magic School Bus series of information books.  In parallel with the mainstream comic-book industry, a tradition of “underground” comics (comix)  – often including satire and other material directed at adults rather than children – emerged in the 1960s.  One of the products of this tradition is Art Spiegelman, whose comix origin is illustrated in his recent Little Lit; Spiegelman received the Pulitzer Prize for his 1987 book, Maus II.
        The advent of offset printing, in which pictures and text were  in the 1920s created new opportunities for illustration (in comparison to letterpress), including variations in the placement of text and illustration and eliminating the need for defined borders (Klemin 15).  Because of the expense of reproducing color illustrations, many picture books were produced with black-and-white pictures only, with limited ("spot") color (adding one color for highlights), or with only partial use of full color.  By careful selection of which pages would receive full-color treatment, it was possible to use the more expensive four-color process for only one part of the book's press run.  Several notable picture books during this period used less than full-color reproduction; e.g., Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, with illustrations by Clement Hurd, used large blocks of color and simple, rhyming words to create a classic “bedtime” book.  Robert McCloskey, on the other hand, used no color at all in the illustrations for his picture story books, including 1942 Caldecott winner Make Way for Ducklings.
        Inexpensive picture books made their appearance with the introduction of Little Golden Books in the fall of 1942.  The books sold for 25 cents, one-tenth the cost of "quality" children's books).  Each of 12 initial titles sold about 125,000 copies within five months and millions of Golden Books were purchased in the first decade (Bader 272).  Generally, Golden Books took titles from the public domain and put most of the production money into the art, drawing on talented artists like Garth Williams and Richard Scarry in addition to "hack" writers and illustrators (Bader 282).
        With further technological developments in the reproduction of art over the past quarter of a century, some have argued that the illustrations have come to dominate picture books at the expense of text; "the integration of the two is being lost." On the other hand, others argue for the current period as "the richest period of experimentation" in picture-book history (Hunt 311).
        This technological sophistication can lead present-day readers to undervalue some of the great illustrated works of the past.  Even distinguished picture books like former Caldecott winners often appear somewhat muddy in color and stylistically undemanding (Janet Spaeth 2/14/98).  This also reflects differences in color preferences (where was "teal" 10 years ago?) and paper technology (Laura Manthey 2/14/98)
 

Sources:   Bader, Barbara, American Picturebooks from Noah's Ark to the Beast Within,  New York: Macmillan, 1976; Cotton, Penni, Picture Books Sans Frontières,  Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 2000; Crane, Walter, The Decorative Illustration of Books (1896), London: Senate, 1994; Hunt, Peter, Ed.,  Children's Literature: An Illustrated History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; Katz, Bill, Ed.,  A History of Book Illustration: 29 Points of View, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994 (articles by Hofer, Holtz, Pantazzi); Klemin, Diana, The Art of Art for Children's Books: A Contemporary Survey,  New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1966; Lundin, Anne, Victorian Horizons: The Reception of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway,  Lanham, MD: ChLA/Scarecrow Press, 2001; Ray, Gordon N., The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914, New York: Pierpont Morgan Library/Dover Publications, 1976. References to names with dates refer to communications on the child_lit electronic discussion group.

Web Sites Related to the History of Picture Books:

• Picturing Childhood, an on-line catalogue for an exhibition of children’s picture books from 1550-1990
• Early Illustrators of Children’s Books with bibliography and links to numerous 19th and early 20th century illustrators
• The Illustrated Book, a digital library of book illustration and design (not generally children’s books)