Fairyland in Art and Poetry

Rating:
Summary: A SUPERB PAIRING OF ART AND POETRY
Review: British artist Richard Doyle (1824-1883), the son of a portrait painter and caricaturist, may be best remembered by some as the creator of the cover design for Punch, which was used for over a century. He also illustrated a number of children's books and created beguiling paintings of fairies, the wee folk. It is the latter that is used to illustrate this lovely keepsake volume.

Doyle's paintings are imaginative and incandescent, luminous illustrations of fairies astride snails, perched on a beetle or relaxing on a verdant hillock. Each illustration perfectly accompanies a poem, such as a tiny one sipping from a cowslip's bell in Shakespeare's "Ariel's Song" or fairies engaged in a tug-of-war with a grasshopper in "An Explanation of the Grasshopper" by Vachel Lindsay.

Other poets represented include John Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Butler Yeats, and Langton Hughes.

The pairing of art and poetry is superb, thoughtfully conceived and executed. This slim volume deserves a place in everyone's library.

- Gail Cooke