ii
I spoke of books with pictures. If you are so lucky as to have the Fairy Tales by Hans Andersen, illustrated by Kay Nielsen, or those other books for which he made the illustrations, The Twelve Dancing Princesses and East of the Sun and West of the Moon, I hope you will say a word to your older friends about this artist. They are likely to be as ecstatically happy as yourself, in the contemplation of the pictures, but not to know what it is they admire. Then you must tell them that Kay Nielsen is a Dane, the son of an actor and a famous actress, who was brought up in a home where the rich furnishings and beautiful colors came from Constantinople and the East. He went to London and saw drawings by Aubrey Beardsley in which all the lines combined elegance, suavity (or great smoothness), power (or sureness and ease), and a certain austerity (bareness, simplicity). And so, by what he had seen and by the nature received from his parents, he became a great artist who could do fiery work with an occasional effect of grim strength; but in these pictures you know he is riotously playful with his lines and his colors alike.
Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham are other great artists who have done much of their finest work in illustrating children’s books. You may have Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book, illustrated by Rackham, or Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book, or Stories From the Arabian Nights, The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales, or Stories from Hans Andersen, each with Dulac’s pictures. Perhaps the most wonderful of all Dulac’s books is the edition of Shakespeare’s comedy of The Tempest.