Mole is butt ugly! (not evident from the cover) He's wears a bowler hat and spats. Rat looks like a monkey from behind and a prosperous self-satisfied burgher from the front.īadger looks like a cat. The black & white line drawings are extremely derivative, but so ill-conceived. I recommend you pass these by while holding your nose. Lorna Tomei illustrated the adaptation by Malvina Vogel as one of the Great Illustrated Classics. John Worsley did all the paintings for the show, a total of 550 of them." So he is quite the expert on the stories. "Wind in the Willows is a 60's Children's TV show, brought to our television screens. Ratty's face is too snub and his teeth stick out.Ī nice touch - Otter is wearing swim trunks when he emerges from the water at the picnic.Īnother note on Worsley. It dominates his face without being cute like the real animal. Mole's nose is obnoxiously long and prominent. His best is a long shot of the river at sunset. His work is reminiscent of Helen Ward, but with less grace. John Worsley illustrated Tales from the Wind in the Willows, which appears to be one chapter at a time in smaller storybooks. I guess the abridgements and adaptations are too numerous to keep track of. I had a few minutes yesterday to stop in the used book store and I found three illustrators, two who weren't even on my list. (see comment #78 below, for my re-evaluation of Ward.) So the picture might not correspond with the part of the story being read. Her book is also a bit off because the artwork is on different paper, and the double sided plates are bound into the book at regularly paced page counts. The only plate in WitW that I really like is this one. (it was published last year.) I highly recommend it. I wonder if it's a matter of loving one story and not the other, or if Aesop's story shows her more mature work. Her artwork, her conceptual take, her sly humor, are all superlative. I'm enraptured by her version of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. I ordered another of her books from the library. They are quite stylized, with profile heads crowding most of the pictures, and very little action indicated. I'll have to see whether those are included in any other editions she illustrates. She skips The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Wayfarers All entirely, and combines the two last chapters into a re-named chapter The Return of Toad. I did a chapter comparison in the Moore edition. His background is technical drawing and he specialized in drawing animals from life at the zoo, which explains his take on the characters. There is very little detail of background and even of props, which are scarce.Īnd I'm editing here because upon further research, I find that Bransom did these pieces in color and they can be found here.īy Charles Scribner, and Bransom was one of the first illustrators, first published in 1913. "He lay prostrate in his misery on the floor." Toad is on his back with legs in the air, very characteristically dramatic.īut otherwise, as rendered, character is difficult to portray. The picture of Toad in the dungeon with the gaoler's daughter is quite funny. But why spend the effort on a minor character? In chapter 4 the winter drawing has artistic merit, being a lovely rendering of the Otter against a snowbank. Mole does seem to be wearing boots when running through the woods at night and oddly, the Sea Rat is clothed while Ratty is not. I find it odd they would use a photograph on the cover, but oh well.īransom's characters are true renderings of real animals, and are mostly only clothed in their own fur. Paul Bransom gives us ten black & white pieces published in 2005 by The Modern Library
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