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“What is the use of a book … without pictures or conversation?” the heroine of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland complains. When you think of Alice, you probably imagine John Tenniel’s 19th-century engravings. Roald Dahl’s BFG is now synonymous with Sir Quentin Blake’s big-eared giant, and the much-loved Gruffalo owes as much to Axel Scheffler’s drawings as Julia Donaldson’s rhymes. And yet illustration nearly always plays second fiddle to words. Caught between fine art and publishing, it is often overlooked as a highly skilled craft in its own right.
Hopefully, this is about to change with the opening of the first permanent home for illustration in the UK, and the largest of its kind in the world. The centre is the brainchild of 93-year-old Sir Quentin Blake, who gives it his name and huge archive of 40,000 drawings. Many wonderful creations – crocodiles, birds, babies who transform into dragons – have sprung from Blake’s imagination. This museum, in a cleverly repurposed 17th-century former waterworks in London’s Clerkenwell, will celebrate the history and future of illustration in all its guises.
For most of us, illustration is our first encounter with art. Picture books are integral to childhood. As Blake has said, they allow very young children to “read a book even if they can’t actually read”. Visual literacy matters, especially given the reading crisis. Adults too would be lost without illustrations; from cereal packets to propaganda, such pictures shape our world.
They also reflect shifting cultural sensibilities. The liminal status of illustration has always attracted outsider voices. Queer as Comics, one of the centre’s inaugural exhibitions, charts how once marginalised voices have become mainstream, from Tove Jansson’s 1954 Moomin cartoon strip to Alice Oseman’s hugely popular Heartstopper, the final instalment of which arrives on Netflix next month. The extraordinary graphic memoir Persepolis by French-Iranian artist and film-maker Marjane Satrapi, who died this week, showed how the genre can transcend boundaries and convey experiences more powerfully than words alone. Her account of growing up during the 1979 Islamic revolution became an international publishing sensation in 2000.
Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are, wrote of the “counterpoint” where “Words are left out – but the picture says it. Pictures are left out – but the word says it.” Text and image can tell different stories, even on the same page. Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt would have been an entirely different – and possibly less successful – book without Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations, which turned a fable into a relatable family adventure. And yet illustrators (like translators) do not have easily accessible sales data, and are often not credited in reviews.
Thanks to advocates such as Blake, recognition has grown with exhibitions at the National Gallery and the British Library. But the UK still trails behind other European countries: in France, comic books and graphic novels are considered “the ninth art”.
An artform that started on cave walls is now under threat from AI. But it can never be replaced. It is the cosy details of Shirley Hughes’s pictures, the strange sadness of Anthony Browne’s books and the energy and optimism of a Blake drawing that makes their work so enduring. They remain with children long after they have outgrown the books themselves. A national institution devoted to illustration shows that it is finally being treated with the seriousness it deserves.
