Scarce anthology of stories and verse for children, brightly illustrated by Cowham, whose impish figures threatened for a time to eclipse the popularity of Kate Greenaway's pastel waifs.
Very good.
Price: $650.00
"The public has acquired a taste for the grotesque rather than the pretty. [...] Miss Hilda Cowham, who draws boys and girls with extravagantly thin and crooked legs, is the delight of illustrated papers." — 'Our Day,' Vol. 20, 1901
One of the first female illustrators for PUNCH and a friend and peer of Mabel Lucie Attwell, Cowham's distinctive long-legged figures with big hair and black stockings had attained an iconic stature by the time CURLY HEADS AND LONG LEGS was published. The Cowham Girl distinguished herself not by fashion and proportion alone, but also by a new degree of physical freedom: she bends, climbs, sprawls, and even slouches. More than one contemporary critic drew attention to the changing fashions in idealized girlhood away from Greenaway's "good, long-skirted, big-bonnetted" types to Cowham's unruly "imps" – a change that met with great popular enthusiasm, with the artist noting, "Very often I get letters from mothers saying that they have dressed their little ones like a Hilda Cowham girl."
Read more: "Baby Wit," Marlborough Express, September 1913.
London: Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd, [1914]. 9.5'' x 7.25''. Original gilt and red pictorial cloth with color plate mounted to front board. All edges gilt. 140 pages. Pictorial endpapers, 12 color plates, and additional black and white illustrations by Cowham. Two plates neatly repaired at margins; rear hinge repaired. Faint spotting and rubbing to boards, moderate foxing throughout.
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