Around Town

As a culture, we fetishise childhood like never before. Our unquenchable appetite for kidult nostalgia can be a far from pretty sight: from grown women modelling themselves on Barbie or sighing over ‘Magic Roundabout’ DVDs to fortysomething skateboarders and Pac-Man enthusiasts. This desire to stave off old age and recapture a more hopeful state of mind is not just about kitsch though: as the Twelfth Annual Illustration Cupboard Winter Exhibition gets under way this week in Mayfair, there will be a chance for connoisseurs of illustrations from children’s books to feast their eyes on some classic artwork, and – for a price – take some home to cherish forever.

Apart from the nostalgia value of the pieces, he attributes buyers’ enthusiasm to a combination of affordability and accessibility. ‘The whole point of these illustrations is that they’re charming,’ he says. ‘They’re not abstract or conceptual, so people feel comfortable around them. And something I’ve always stressed is that, though they’re not cheap, they are in the range that many people might be able to afford for a special occasion.’

Prices this year start at around £150 for a signed book, rising to £1,500 for a limited edition print and up to several thousand for an original by a well-loved artist like Shirley Hughes. This year, signed limited-edition box sets of ‘Mr Benn’ by David McKee, at £195, are bound to be snapped up by grown-ups who loved the stories in their early years. More recent work, likely to appeal to those looking for a special present for a child, includes illustrations by Mini Grey, who is offering originals from her award-winning ‘The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon’ and Nilesh Mistry, whose pictures for ‘The Story of Divali’ are wonderfully fresh and immediate.

Several other favourites are certainly going to pull in fans – like the silk prints by Dick de Bruna, creator of Miffy the rabbit, and the limited-edition lithographs from Maurice Sendak’s classic ‘Where The Wild Things Are’, a book so magical that it’s entranced every generation to discover it since it was first published in 1971. There are also originals from Jill Murphy’s 1981 favourite ‘Peace at Last’, the first of her works ever to be sold.

Huddy points out that it’s only in the last few decades that mass-market picture books for children have existed – it was developments in offset lithographic printing in the 1960s which enabled manufacturers to produce high volumes of affordable full-colour books – earlier children’s books, like ‘The Cat In The Hat’, were limited to two colours. In a sense, the world’s children have been the saviours of commercial illustration as a viable way for artists to make a living; for a long time, they were almost the only consumers left in an increasingly photographic world. Now, the digital revolution has radically changed the way illustrators work – and forced artists, collectors and gallerists like Huddy to adapt. ‘You can’t sell original digital artwork, but you can do very limited runs of very high-quality prints,’ he says. ‘These prints are amazingly detailed – believe me, you’re not getting something that looks like an Athena poster. And after all, people have been making prints from woodcuts for centuries.’

Indeed, John Lawrences’s engravings for Philip Pullman’s ‘Lyra’s Oxford’ – also in the exhibition – prove that the old techniques are still in demand, and show that the appetite for illustration is starting to migrate back towards the adult market; as photography becomes more disposable, more and more people are starting to cherish unique, crafted objects. So who’s buying children’s artwork? ‘Anybody and everybody,’ says Huddy.

‘Some people are obviously collectors, but we see many people who just want to splash out on an illustration as
a one-off. We see some people who come back year after – they don’t always buy, but from time to time they treat themselves to something.’

And mainly, it seems, the works are being bought to hang on somebody’s wall, rather than languish in a vault somewhere to put on value. ‘Although obviously many of these works will appreciate, I always say that they shouldn’t be bought as an investment,’ says Huddy. ‘You should buy them because you love them.’