Walter Crane Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Walter Crane

Walter Crane was a Victorian illustrator, designer, poet, teacher, Socialist, and painter whose advocacy of affordable colored picture books helped influence the look of nineteenth-century British children's literature. He was born on 15 August 1845 in Liverpool, the third of five children to Marie and Thomas Crane. His father was a painter and portraitist who had also operated a lithographic press with his two brothers. Because of Thomas Crane's ill health and futile attempts to make a success of his art, the family moved often. Nevertheless, Crane remembered his childhood fondly and the times he spent catching butterflies, blowing up things in the garden with gunpowder, lying on the floor of his father's studio drawing, completing the study sketches his father made, and copying pictures from his father's books. Crane became known at a young age as an accomplished artist, and he received the position of apprentice as a result of some illustrations he had made that came to the attention of critic John Ruskin and William James Linton, a student of Thomas Bewick and one of the best wood engravers of his time.

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