The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen

by Hans Christian Andersen

  31. Elias Bredsdorff cites the schedule as reported by Andersen in a letter to Henriette Hanck (Bredsdorff, Hans Christian Andersen, 132). As Rossel points out, “Andersen’s daily life was extremely comfortable during his later life. He continued to see his old friends at least once a week as their dinner guest, a tradition that stemmed from his early years in Copenhagen. He saw in this way Edvard and Henriette Collin on Mondays, Adolph and Ingeborg Drewson on Tuesdays, Brigitte Ørsted, the widow of Hans Christian Ørsted, and her daughter Mathilde on Wednesdays, Moritz and Dorothea Melchior on Thursdays, Ida Koch, the widowed sister of Henriette Wulff, on Fridays, and Martin and Therese Henriques on Sundays” (Rossel 1996, 73).

  32. Hans Christian Andersen, A Poet’s Bazaar: A Picturesque Tour in Germany, Italy, Greece, and the Orient (New York: Minerva, 2004).

  33. Wolfgang Lederer, The Kiss of the Snow Queen: Hans Christian Andersen and Man’s Redemption by Women (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 83.

  34. Bredsdorff, 150.

  35. Hans Christian Andersen, Mit eget Eventyr uden Digtning (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1959), 107.

  36. Andersen, Travels, 166.

  37. Hans Christian Andersen, letter to Henriette Wulff, April 1843, in Bille and Bøgh, II, 82.

  38. Hans Christian Andersen, letter to Henriette Wulff, May 3, 1843, in Bille and Bøgh, II, 405.

  39. Wolfgang Lederer, The Kiss of the Snow Queen, 79.

  40. Andersen, Travels, 215.

  41. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, 310, 312.

  42. Jackie Wullschlager’s biography provides extensive documentation and full elaboration of fantasies, anxieties, and encounters.

  43. Ibid., 252–53.

  44. Bredsdorff, Hans Christian Andersen, 266.

  45. Ibid., 269.

  Andersen’s Illustrators

  HONOR APPLETON (1879–1951)

  Born in Brighton, England, Honor Charlotte Appleton studied at the South Kensington Schools, Frank Calderon’s School of Animal Painting, and the Royal Academy Schools. She published her first book, The Bad Mrs. Ginger, in 1902 and joined the ranks of professional book illustrators with Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1910). Influenced by Kate Greenaway and Mabel Lucie Attwell, she illustrated over one hundred and fifty books in her lifetime but is best known for her collaboration with Mrs. H. C. Cradock on a series about a little girl named Josephine and her beloved toys. In the 1930s and 1940s, she worked for George G. Harrap publishers and illustrated literary classics for children, among them Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Ali Baba, and Black Beauty. Her 1919 illustrations for an adapted version of Andersen’s “Snow Queen” were followed by beautifully muted pastel watercolors for a volume of the fairy tales.

  MABEL LUCIE ATTWELL (1879–1964)

  Born in Mile End, London, Mabel Lucie Attwell was the ninth of ten children in a family of extraordinary musical and artistic talent. At age fifteen, she submitted her art work to a publisher and received what she described with pride as “a cheque for two guineas.” The proceeds from her drawings enabled her to attend art schools, and soon she was taking commissions from book publishers and magazine editors.

  In 1908, Attwell married Harold Earnshaw, a successful artist who worked in pen, ink, and watercolor. Peggy, the first of their three children, was born in 1909 and served as the inspiration for the innocent wide-eyed wonderment in Attwell’s portraits of children. Commercial firms were quick to discover the appeal of Attwell’s chubby, rosy-cheeked toddlers, placing them in advertisements for Jaeger Footwear (“For Tiny Toes”), Swan Fountain Pens (“A Present for Daddy”), and Velvet Skin Soap (“Baby Chooses”). Valentine and Sons enlisted her to design postcards, calendars, greeting cards, and plaques. Her artwork decorated not only the walls of homes but also, according to at least one report, World War I dugouts.

  Attwell began illustrating fairy tales and children’s books in 1910 with Grimms’ Fairy Tales and Mother Goose, followed by Alice in Wonderland (1910), Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1914), and The Water-Babies (1915). At the request of J. M. Barrie, she created illustrations for a gift-book edition of Peter Pan and Wendy, which appeared in 1921 and became a best-seller. It remains the most successful of all her books. Unlike Rackham, Dulac, and the Robinsons, she aimed to please the child rather than the adult.

  Never short of work, Attwell even found a patron for her art in Marie, Queen of Romania. In the 1930s and 1940s she worked with manufacturers to produce china figures and rubber dolls while continuing to produce illustrations, plaques, postcards, and posters. She moved to Fowey in Cornwall in 1945 and stayed there until her death in 1964.

  Further Reading:

  Beetles, Chris. Mabel Lucie Attwell. London: Pavilion, 1988.

  ELEANOR VERE BOYLE (1825–1916)

  Eleanor Vere Boyle, born Eleanor Gordon, illustrated a small number of children’s books, including Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1872) and the gift book Beauty and the Beast: An Old Tale New-Told (1875). Her lavish color plates included figures with Italianate costumes and stylized depictions of nature. Andersen himself was unimpressed by Boyle’s illustrations, finding them lacking in aesthetic quality despite the lavish images. He remarked that royalties for the English-language edition would be far more interesting to him than the images created by Boyle. Toward the end of her life, EVB (as she signed herself) illustrated books on gardening.

  HARRY CLARKE (1889–1931)

  Harry Clarke has been hailed as Ireland’s major Symbolist artist, an illustrator and craftsman whose commitment to fin-de-siècle aestheticism and mysticism led to the creation of images both beautiful and macabre. The son of a glass worker, he attended a Catholic boys’ school (Belvedere College) as well as the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and the South Kensington School of Design in London.

  In 1913 Laurence Waldron, a governor of Belvedere College, commissioned Clarke to produce a set of illustrations for Pope’s Rape of the Lock. The six images, heavily influenced by Aubrey Beardsley, used pen and ink to evoke rococo decorative effects. Shortly thereafter George Harrap turned to Clarke with plans to issue an illustrated edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. “But for me,” the publisher reported, “he would probably have abandoned the idea of illustrating books” (Bowe, 30). Harrap’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen came in the wake of Hodder and Stoughton’s Stories from Hans Andersen, illustrated by Edmund Dulac, and In Powder and Crinoline: Old Fairy Tales, illustrated by Kay Nielsen. In the early part of the twentieth century, new technologies for reproducing images enabled book illustration to flourish.

  Clarke dedicated several months to illustrations for Andersen’s fairy tales, combining that project with artwork for several stories by Edgar Allan Poe, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Illustrated volumes of Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, Goethe’s Faust, and Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner (the plates for the latter were destroyed during an armed uprising in Dublin) followed in quick succession. Clarke alternated between commissions for illustrating literary works and designs for stained glass windows to be installed in the Honan Chapel in Cork, a building that displays the vibrant qualities of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. The beauty of these windows is widely acknowledged. Here, Clarke was able to display his mastery of color, design, and craft.

  The publication of Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen in 1916 saw praise from The Bookman, which lauded Clarke as “a craftsman who devotes to each drawing an infinity of pains which is little less than marvelous, and it is difficult to know which to admire most, his fresh conceptions or his delicate and intricate details.” Other reviews were less generous, criticizing the derivative nature of the illustrations, which would have been “more agreeable if his admiration for Beardsley had been less pronounced.”

  Harry Clarke maintained a sense of reverence toward the stories he illustrated. “I feel I do not do a book as it should be done. I see my drawings and there is only a hazy background of Book, whereas the dra
wings should, as you have so many times said, be subordinate to the whole,” he wrote to one publisher. “I did my best to convey what I felt,” he wrote about Goethe’s Faust, when booksellers criticized what Clarke called the “lewd and stinking” illustrations, which left a “nasty taste in the mouth.”

  In 1929 Clarke left Dublin to spend time at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. Although he was to return to Ireland for a few months the following year, he never recovered his health and died in his sleep in a small Swiss village at the age of forty-one.

  Further Reading:

  Bowe, Nicola Gordon. The Life and Work of Harry Clarke. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989.

  Frazier, Adrian. “Harry Clarke and the Material Culture of Modern Ireland.” Textual Practice 16 (2002): 303–21.

  EDMUND DULAC (1882–1953)

  A passion for pattern, texture, and pigment marks the illustrations produced by Edmund Dulac. Although Dulac was remarkably versatile as an artist—designing everything from postage stamps and paper money to theater costumes and furniture—he is best known today as one of the eminent illustrators of a period known as the golden age of children’s book illustration. During the decade preceding World War I, Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, Charles Robinson, and W. Heath Robinson adorned children’s books with stunning color plates. While Rackham remained faithful to his British roots and turned to Nordic mythology for his inspiration, Dulac, born in France in 1882, became a passionate Anglophile who also looked to Asia to enrich the manner and matter of his art. Rackham, it has been said, painted with his pencil, while Dulac, master of sensuous designs and exotic settings, drew with his brush.

  A native of Toulouse, Dulac studied art while attending law classes at the university. After receiving a prize for his painting, he abandoned his legal studies to devote himself fully to art school. An ardent admirer of William Morris, Walter Crane, and Aubrey Beardsley, Dulac changed the spelling of his first name from “Edmond” to the more British “Edmund,” whereupon his friends began referring to him as “l’Anglais.”

  It was in London that Dulac got his start in the art of book illustration. The publishing house of J. M. Dent commissioned sixty watercolors for a complete set of the Brontë sisters’ novels. Encouraged by the offer, Dulac decided to stay in London, working as a contributing illustrator to the Pall Mall Gazette, a monthly magazine. The publishing house of Hodder & Stoughton, competing against William Heinemann, who had just signed on Rackham, hired Dulac to illustrate The Arabian Nights, a perfect match for the artist. Using varied shades of blue—indigo, cobalt, cerulean, lilac, lavender, and mauve—Dulac produced starry backgrounds with a magical quality so powerful that they dominated the composition. Dulac effaced differences between background and foreground, producing a visual plane that required the viewer to scan the entire surface. Increasingly, Dulac liberated his art from Western artistic conventions, eliminating the conventional use of perspective and investing his energy in decorative surfaces with rich hues and designs. “The end result of objective imitative art,” he wrote, “is nothing less than colored photography.”

  Dulac’s illustrations for “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella,” “Bluebeard,” and “Sleeping Beauty” were produced to accompany Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Sleeping Beauty and Other Tales from the Old French (1910). Stories from Hans Andersen appeared just two years later. During World War I, when business was slack, Dulac was commissioned to prepare illustrations for a book of fairy tales that became known as Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book—Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations. The volume, published in 1916, revealed Dulac’s adaptability, for he was able to produce illustrations that captured the artistic styles of the different nations represented in the volume. While Dulac’s interest in fairy-tale illustration waned as the years passed, he remained artistically active until his death, composing music, designing banknotes, and developing an interest in spiritualism.

  Further Reading:

  Larkin, David. Edmund Dulac. Toronto: Peacock/Bantam, 1975.

  White, Colin. Edmund Dulac. New York: Scribners, 1976.

  KAY NIELSEN (1886–1957)

  The art historian Sir Kenneth Clark once confessed that Arthur Rackham’s fairy-tale illustrations had stamped “images of terror” on his imagination. How much more troubled might he have been by the illustrations of Kay Nielsen, the Danish Aubrey Beardsley whose heroes and heroines, bent with sinewy determination, make their way through powerfully eerie landscapes. Nielsen arrests our attention with his flattened perspectives and graceful linework in vast, arctic terrains.

  Born in 1886 in Copenhagen, Nielsen was the son of parents who were part of a robust theatrical culture. His mother was a leading lady and popular singer, while his father worked as managing director of the Royal Theater. “They brought me up in a tense atmosphere of art,” the artist reported of his parents. As a child, Nielsen was accustomed to meeting such notables as Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Grieg on a regular basis. The young Nielsen was determined to become a physician, but by age seventeen his plans changed, and he moved to Paris, where he studied art for nearly a decade.

  Nielsen was fascinated not only by the work of the British artist Aubrey Beardsley but also by the Art Nouveau style in general and by Japanese woodcuts. In Paris, he was commissioned to illustrate volumes of poems by Heinrich Heine and Paul Verlaine. In 1913 he produced twenty-four water-colors for a book of fairy tales retold by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. In Powder and Crinoline was subsequently published in the United States under the title Twelve Dancing Princesses. The volume secured Nielsen’s reputation as an illustrator and led to additional commissioned works, the most important of which was East of the Sun and West of the Moon, a collection of Norwegian fairy tales that proved a congenial match for the Danish artist, whose works pulse with eerie decorative energy.

  Nielsen’s career lost its momentum with the onset of the war years, and he returned to Copenhagen, where set design occupied his attention. For the Danish State Theater, he produced sets for a theatrical version of Aladdin, as well as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. During the interwar years, Nielsen illustrated two additional volumes of fairy tales, a collection of Andersen’s fairy tales (1924), and an anthology of tales by the Brothers Grimm (1925).

  Nielsen spent the last two decades of his life in the United States. Los Angeles proved attractive to him and his wife and, despite straitened economic circumstances, he enjoyed his short spell at Disney Studios, where he designed the “Bald Mountain” sequence for Fantasia. He was unwilling to compromise his artistic standards for commercial success, however, and was reduced to raising chickens for a time. Painting a mural at the local high school helped him eke out a living (the 34′ × 19′ image was stripped from the wall a year later to make way for charts of school districts).

  Nielsen died in 1957 and left to family friends seemingly worthless paintings illustrating The Thousand and One Nights. They remain among the most stunning of Nielsen’s artworks, although they have never been incorporated into an edition of the tales.

  Further Reading:

  Britton, Jasmine. “Kay Nielsen—Danish Artist.” The Horn Book (May 1945): 168–73.

  Larkin, David. Kay Nielsen. Toronto: Peacock/Bantam, 1975.

  Poltarnees, Welleran. Kay Nielsen: An Appreciation. La Jolla, CA: Green Tiger Press, 1976.

  VILHELM PEDERSEN (1820–1859) AND LORENZ FRØLICH (1820–1908)

  When Andersen’s fairy tales first appeared, they were not illustrated. Pedersen, an officer in the navy, was asked to provide images for a complete set of the stories. Engraved on wood at the Leipzig firm of Kretschmar, the pencil drawings (of which there were over a hundred) first appeared in a German translation of 1848.

  After Pedersen’s death, Lorenz Frølich took over work on the fairy tales, with the first drawings appearing in 1870.

  ARTHUR RACKHAM (1867–1939)

  During the golden age of children’s books launched by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, t
he British illustrator Arthur Rackham fashioned images both sprightly and haunting for fairy tales and fantasy literature. Known for his “wide and elfish grin,” Rackham used himself as a model for many of the whimsical creatures that inhabit his illustrated books. The uncanny resemblance between him and his creations was often noted. “I thought he was one of the goblins out of Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” his nephew recalled.

  Rackham grew up in a respected, middle-class Victorian family. As a child, he showed a talent for drawing and often smuggled paper and pencil with him into bed. On the recommendation of a physician, the sixteen-year-old Rackham left school to take a six-month sea voyage, journeying to Australia in 1893 with family friends and returning in improved health. Convinced that his real calling was at the easel, he entered the Lambeth School of Art but was obliged to spend the years 1885 to 1892 working in an insurance office. He left the insurance business to become a full-time graphic journalist at the Westminster Budget, where his “Sketches from Life” received critical and popular acclaim.

  In 1900 Rackham was invited to illustrate The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. The success of that volume launched him as an illustrator, and in 1902 he created the images for J. M. Barrie’s A Little White Bird. His publication of an edition of Rip Van Winkle in 1905 secured his reputation as the Edwardian era’s most prominent illustrator. In constant demand as an artist, he was commissioned to illustrate Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Garden (Rackham had “shed glory” on the work, Barrie believed) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

  For Rackham, illustrations conveyed the pleasures of the text and communicated the “sense of delight or emotion aroused by the accompanying passage of literature.” He endorsed the importance of fantasy in books for children and affirmed the “educative power of imaginative, fantastic, and playful pictures and writings for children in their most impressionable years.”