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  Surveying the world: tableau, sketchbook, panorama

  From the outset, picture books attempted a wide purview. From the Reformation through the Enlightenment, Orbis Pictus books demonstrated the world’s knowability, by laying out visual realms (from natural history to architecture). Their tableaux arranged collections of representative items, persons or activities, often numbered and labelled. Sometimes they showed items embedded – and being used – in domestic or occupational scenes, sometimes objects already isolated for analysis. In both cases, objects gained further significance from context. With its emphasis on close observation and taxonomic classification, this mode of visualisation dovetailed with juvenile science education. Yet from Comenius onward, the Orbis Pictus genre and its German successor, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anschauungslehre book, also diagrammed social life, from occupational milieu to familial relationships. As the designation ‘Anschauungslehre’ suggested, such picture books offered ‘teaching through seeing’, not only conveying information but modelling modes of visual analysis.

  In Britain, too, the picture book developed from two complementary types of portfolios: natural history engravings, illustrating zoological taxonomies (Thomas Boreman’s Description of Three Hundred Animals, London, 1730), and the Cries of London, evoking urban complexity and sensory overload. If Renaissance composers like Orlando Gibbons, William Byrd and Clement Jannequin used the Cries of London and Paris as the basis for polyphonic fugues, eighteenth-century Cries portfolios imagined metropolitan economic exchange in proto-symphonic terms. Cataloguing each ‘guild’ of London peddlers according to their characteristic wares, costumes and sung sales pitch, the Cries appealed simultaneously to multiple sensory and aesthetic registers. By the Romantic period, picture-book versions of the Cries were addressed to child readers. Some, like Ann and Jane Taylor’s New Cries of London or, Itinerant trades of the British metropolis (London, 1806), emphasised the Cries’ tragic undertones: as the metropolis became bigger and more anonymous, the individual peddler’s call implicitly articulated a cry for help, a fear of starvation amid plenty.

  The Taylors’ City Scenes, or A Peep into London for Good Children (London, 1806?) teaches political economy more indirectly. The volume’s short pieces (alternating poems and prose descriptions) describe different facets of urban life. Each piece is keyed to engravings (by their brother Isaac Taylor the Younger), grouped in threes on the facing page, a format which synchronises image and text, yet allows an autonomy of medium and address. The Taylors’ urban survey, indeed, envisions city dwellers bound by continuity, economic exchange and ethical responsibility, but often fated to live past one another. City Scenes’ principles of juxtaposition and contrast were magnified by the Taylors’ companion volume Rural Scenes, or A Peep into the Countryside for Good Children (London, 1806?). In their oppositional pairings, experimental relationship between image and text, and account of city and country life, the Scenes offer implicit dialogue with William Blake’s visionary Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (London, 1789, 1793). Now the most famous illustrated books of the Romantic period, Blake’s Songs were not meant for child readers (despite many songs written in children’s voices, and Blake’s stress on children’s lives as an index of social morality); conceived as experimental artist’s books, the Songs circulated as codices inside Blake’s small London circle (including the Taylors, children of Blake’s fellow copperplate engraver Isaac Taylor the Elder).

  Picture books gained a secure market niche in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet amateur artists continued to design private picture-narratives, intended solely for familial or coterie use. Frankfurt psychiatrist Heinrich Hoffman composed Struwwelpeter as a Christmas present for his son; Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London, 1865) and some Beatrix Potter books originated, likewise, as hand-illustrated picture-stories written for particular children. Once published, these picture-narratives became children’s classics. Others remained, for generations, in private hands.

  Two particularly fascinating family compilations were begun in 1859 yet not published until the 1980s. ‘Christine’s Billedbog’ (‘Christine’s Picture Book’), an elaborate scrapbook compiled by Hans Christian Andersen and Adolph Drewsen for Drewsen’s granddaughter, assembled an encyclopaedic cross-section of nineteenth-century print culture (including news headlines, etchings, Danish broadsides, catalogue clippings, zoological and religious images), embellished with hand-cut silhouettes.4 In its heterogeneity, this multi-media collage parallels nineteenth-century crazy quilts, and anticipates surrealist collage books like E. V. Lucas and George Morrow’s What a Life (London, 1911) and Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté (Paris, 1934). Yet topical ordering and hand-written annotations also render the scrapbook internally harmonious, section by section.

  Drawing on a different range of visual traditions, the autobiographical watercolour album begun, at ages eleven and twelve, by British sisters Louisa and Madalene Pasley offers rare insight into the creative lives of nineteenth-century children. The Pasleys chronicle their comic misadventures as aspiring entomologists: even on vacation at Lake Windermere, they escape their drawing master to gather beetle larvae. Their album parodies key aspects of nineteenth-century visual education, from naturalists’ field-notebooks and taxonomising to sketching assignments and watercolour landscape-drawing.5 Yet it also includes a comic, Orbis Pictus-derived watercolour tableau (complete with numbered key) anatomising the Pasleys’ frenzied vacation departure; wry sketches of the doomed sketching party and the girls’ struggle with outsize insects; and, finally, the title-page of Madalene’s first published field-guide, fruit of their autodidactic field education.

  The Pasleys, trained in naturalist recordkeeping, reinvented the sketchbook as autobiography and parody. Randolph Caldecott crosses the sketchbook with the Orbis Pictus, to relativise the tableau as a format for visual information. A new phase of picture-book production began, proverbially, with the mid-nineteenth-century development of new methods of colour printing. Walter Crane’s and Caldecott’s path-breaking nursery rhyme books were thus anchored by richly coloured, subtly detailed tableaux. Yet the exigencies of picture-book publishing often necessitated colour spreads to be interspersed with black and white pages. Caldecott turns this economic consideration into a structural principle, playing off highly detailed, yet fundamentally static colour tableaux against a running series of brilliantly drafted black-and-white sketches. Later illustrators continued Caldecott’s experiments. The colour spreads in Lois Lenski’s Mr Small series (New York, 1934–64) involve only one additional colour beyond black and white – yet this only increases their impact; Dahlov Ipcar’s The Cat at Night (New York, 1969) oscillates between colour and black-and-white to explore the inverse world visible with feline night-vision; Remy Charlip’s Fortunately (New York, 1964) does so to explore perspectival differences, as his story oscillates between fortunate and unfortunate developments.

  Like the Orbis Pictus books, Caldecott’s tableaux offer overviews of literary, cultural or historical tradition. The frontispiece of his virtuoso Sing a Song for Sixpence (London, 1880) – an old lady beckoning a young audience – echoes the famous frontispiece of Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose (Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé, ou Contes de ma mère l’Oie, Paris, 1697); Sing’s later plates compactly evoke the corpus of traditional stories and chapbooks long central to children’s experience of literature. The walls of the little king’s counting-house are lined with murals depicting Robinson Crusoe and Jack the Giant Killer, while the tile fireplace features the Bremen Town Musicians and animal fables; murals in the little queen’s parlour depict Bo Peep, Babes in the Woods, and Red Riding Hood, and on a tiled sideboard, The Three Bears (fig. 8). Yet if such multi-layered tableaux firmly nest Caldecott’s book in a long storytelling tradition, his intervening sketches insistently insert the story into the present, capturing transient, singular moments, fleeting movements, expressions and impressions. Some sketches are wordl
ess, opening hitherto unexplored facets of the story. Others animate a tiny phrase, even a single word (‘Baked’). Caldecott’s sketch aesthetic changes his – and his readers’ – relationship to the familiar text he illustrates. Instead of treating it as a single coherent narrative, Caldecott breaks its words into autonomous groups of sound, meaning and visualisation. Lines or verses the reader already knows by heart, as a firm, fixed unit, are given new meaning, as previously subordinate phrases are depicted in their own right.

  Figure 8. Randolph Caldecott, Sing a song of sixpence. London: Frederick Warne, c. 1883. ‘Queen was in the parlour counting all her money’.

  Early twentieth-century author-illustrators continued Caldecott’s experiment with sketchbook elements, along with other visual formats. Using naturalists’ observational, watercolour and taxonomic techniques, Walter Crane and Beatrix Potter in England, Sibylle von Olfers and Ernst Kreidolf in Germany and Switzerland, and Elsa Beskow in Sweden created anthropomorphic tales of animal and plant life.

  Others adapted the sketchbook itself as a format for expository narratives. Ernst Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages (New York, 1903), recounting Canadian boys’ woodcraft explorations, is both illustrated by Seton’s interpolated plate illustrations and framed, on most page margins, by running sketches and diagrams; Kurt Wiese’s circulation novel The Chinese Ink Stick (New York, 1929) likewise alternates verbal and visual ethnographic sketches. Orbis Pictus books offered cross-sections of the world; now, slender sketchbook stories began to support almost encyclopaedic apparatuses. Holling Clancy Holling’s Paddle-to-the-Sea (Boston, 1941) and Minn of the Mississippi (Boston, 1951) interlard narrative with tableaux, maps and scientific diagrams.

  Virginia Burton’s Katy and the Big Snow (Boston, 1942) and Maybelline the Cable Car (Boston, 1952) explore new technology in relationship to urban planning, visualised as friezes or as stylised communication or transportation networks literally framing individual pictures. The lecture on earth’s evolution in Burton’s Life Story (Boston, 1962) uses multiple pictorial layers and frames to underscore both the complexity of all timelines, and the interconnection of cosmological, geological and biological developments. Antonio Jiménez-Landi and F. Goico Aguirre’s La ciudad (A First Look at a City in Spain, Madrid, 1955) and David Macaulay’s popular Cathedral (Boston, 1973) and Pyramid (Boston, 1975) introduce young readers to urban planning and architectural drawings; Anne Millard and Steve Noon’s A Street Through Time (London, 1998) adds a temporal dimension to the cross-section.

  Peter Sís’ Follow the Dream: The Story of Christopher Columbus (New York, 1991), A Small Tale from the Far North (New York, 1993), Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei (New York, 1996) and Tibet through the Red Box (New York, 1998) simultaneously explore the shape of the world (or cosmos) and the long history of attempts to chart or picture its dimensions. Expeditions and astronomical discoveries are thus chronicled by evoking a huge range of pictorial records, from ‘official’ navigational and meteorological charts to mythological star maps and ethnographic sketches in the distinctive style of nineteenth-century whalers’ and Inuits’ whalebone scrimshaw carvings.

  Sís’ Madlenka (New York, 2000) foregrounds the lingering influence of the nineteenth-century panoramas. Gigantic paintings-in-the-round, often displaying landscapes, cityscapes or battles, panoramas were displayed publicly in dedicated circular buildings, which enabled seamless 360-degree viewing. From Lothar Meggendorfer’s fold-out, 360-degree paper surround Im Stadtpark (The City Park, Munich, 1887) to Clement Hurd’s Town and Country (New York, 1939), children’s novelty books replicated this format in miniature and on paper. The late-nineteenth-century ‘Emperor’s Panorama’ (Kaiserpanorama) offered the opposite viewing experience of private, stereoscopic views. Seated at intervals around a polygonal pillar (housing a double slide carousel), each visitor looked through specific eyeholes at a three-dimensional photograph. At regular intervals, each scene gave way to the next; sometimes a sequence of photographs cumulatively unfolded a semi-panoramic view, of riverbank or cityscape. In 1930s France, Marie Colmont and Alexandra Exter’s influential Panoramas of Père Castor series – Panorama du fleuve (Down the River, Paris, 1937); Panorama de la montagne (Up the Mountain, Paris, 1938); Panorama de la côte (Along the Coast, Paris, 1938) – conjoined both traditions. In each, Exter’s series of panorama ‘slices’, viewed initially as separate double-spreads, could be unfolded to form a full 360-degree paper panorama. Many paper panoramas were wordless; these, like nineteenth-century panorama guides, are explicated, panel for panel, by Colmont’s verbal descriptions of the landscape’s geographical, geological and economic dimensions.

  Exter’s tableaux echo specific scenes – balloon view of a tropical coast, dockside view of a port, ski-slope view of an alpine landscape – from Jean de Brunhoff’s Le voyage de Babar (Babar’s Travels, Paris, 1932). Brunhoff’s earlier Histoire de Babar (Story of Babar, Paris, 1931) offered a more eclectic range of visual pleasures: urban spectacles (Babar riding the elevator, elephants studying store windows, Babar maturing as he acquires a fashionable new look and is photographed); angled urban views; a semi-aerial countryside tableau. Following Babar, American illustrators alternated panoramic tableaux with other perspectives. In Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings (New York, 1941) and Don Freeman’s Fly High Fly Low (New York, 1957), birds raising young in Boston and San Francisco occasion bird’s-eye and kerbside urban views.6 H. A. Rey’s Curious George (Boston, 1941) moves from a balloonist’s aerial perspective to the stylised firehouse map of the same city; Curious George Takes a Job (Boston, 1947) juxtaposes urban street scenes with the window-washer’s view into the skyscraper’s – and the city’s – hundred storeys, and stories. Rey’s picture book thus inherits both versions of the panorama, combining broad overviews with visual depth, alternating between a tabular and an advent calendar approach to illustration, each picture a window to look through.

  Madlenka, likewise, explores a single New York City block using differently scaled visualisations, from an aerial city map to 360-degree circular mapping (adapted from traditional panorama guides) of every building. In the process, Sís reconciles apparently disparate genres within expository picture books: sketchbook experiments in perspective and cross-section; city planning books; panoramas. What enables fresh perception, paradoxically, is an immersion in much older visual conventions, an awareness of the palimpsestic layers of urban spaces.

  Twentieth-century picture books offered many ways of locating one’s place in the world. Some hewed close to the Orbis Pictus: in E. Boyd Smith’s The Farm Book (Boston, 1910), The Seashore Book (Boston, 1912) and The Railroad Book (Boston, 1913), for instance, children’s summer visits to farm, boatyard, station became didactic occasions for tableaux depicting eco-spheres, occupational cultures and technology. Other milieu studies, in contrast, stressed the texture of locales, vicissitudes of perception, subjective dimensions of seeing. William Kurelek’s A Prairie Boy’s Winter (Montreal, 1973) recalls farm routines, celebrations and setbacks as indices of Depression-era rural poverty, yet the apparently monotonous prairie landscape proves visually rich, teaching the author to see and to paint. Kurelek’s semi-naïve tableaux record striking compositional conjunctures: fresh truck tracks on snowy road; skaters’ rigid, asymmetrical legs bisecting flat prairie horizon; snowfall, blizzard or snowplough backdraft changing the quality of light; a woman bent over the fence, calling the pigs; transparent water becoming opaque skating-rink ice. The charged autobiographical tableaux of Carmen Lomas Garza’s Family Pictures / Cuadros de familia (San Francisco, 1990) and Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach (New York, 1991) centre similarly on materially impoverished but visually expansive childhoods; in Texan immigrant communities and New York tenements, Chicano and African-American children sleeping on the roof are empowered by panoramic survey. In such narratives, perspective is power.

  Angles of seeing: the gospel of modernism

  What does it mean to see the world with fresh eyes? Us
ing clearly labelled pictures, Orbis Pictus books initiated children into the world’s complexity, teaching them ways of observing, analysing, categorising. Influenced by amateur naturalists, nineteenth- and twentieth-century sketchbook narratives stressed children’s growing independence of discernment, judgment and expression. Orbis Pictus books envisioned child readers as learners; sketchbook narratives saw them as observers and future artists.

  Both genres depicted the world as stable and knowable. Yet other formats attempted to inculcate scepticism, teaching child readers to question the veracity of text and image. Parodic cautionary tales armed children against didactic pieties and social conventions. Pedagogues expecting children to follow a strict moral and behavioural code, they suggest, have forgotten what it is like to inhabit a child’s mind and body; meanwhile, they seem oddly blind to adult failings.

  Parodic cautionary tales demonstrate this double standard in their own bifurcation of content and form, using doggerel and comic rhymes to convey strict messages, juxtaposing stern narrative with playful or mocking pictures. Visual hyperbole renders some of Struwwelpeter’s pictures funny as well as disturbing. The cat chorus bewailing their self-immolated mistress mocks the conventions of the pious juvenile deathbed; the self-righteous parents angrily bemoaning their lost dinner (while their chair-tipping child lies pinned beneath its wreckage) lack all parental solicitude. In Hillaire Belloc’s ‘Jim, Who Ran Away from his Nurse, and was Eaten by a Lion’ (Cautionary Tales for Children, London, 1907), likewise, the narrator’s gloating enumeration of the adult world’s kindnesses to Jim is undercut by Basil T. Blackwood’s illustration showing him snoozing through humdrum ‘treats’. At the zoo, the lion’s corpulent keeper almost bestirs himself to prevent catastrophe; his failure of action dooms Jim. And Jim’s parents quickly abandon all pretence at grief for hatchet-faced moralising about the inevitability of their son’s violent demise.