Walter Crane was a famous painter, illustrator, designer, and decorative artist who paved the way for the picture book as a special medium that is far more demanding than a simply illustrated book. He also designed decorative tiles, pottery, wallpapers, posters, and stained glass.
Walter Crane was born on August 15th, 1845. His father Thomas Crane was a successful portraitist and miniaturist. His older brother Thomas became a successful painter as well and (also older) sister Lucy, with whom Walter collaborated on several occasions, became a noted writer, translator, and art critic.
Due to bad health, Thomas Crane's family lived in Torquay, by the sea, where Walter developed a love for landscapes with the sea and the ships. His additional love was reading, especially Walter Scott's novels, where he got his first taste for romance.
In his father's studio began his informal education which was upgraded after moving to London. As a twelve-year-old boy, he enjoyed watching exhibitions at Royal Academy, especially paintings by Sir Edwin Landseer. Young Walter frequently visited nature, enjoying landscapes, farms, and pastures, and later the ZOO gardens, where he trained his hand by drawing animals.
When he was fourteen his distinguished style already began developing in a kind of conflicting old school, represented by engraver William James Linton and the revolutionary movement of pre-Raphaelites. He was Linton's apprentice for three years, not only developing solid draughtsmanship skills but also witnessing remarkable changes in printing technique at the beginning of the second half of the 19th century. At Linton, he had a chance to examine the works of the greatest masters of the time (like Frederick Leighton, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederick Sandys, Sir John Tenniel, and Frederick Walker) how they were transformed from drawings through engraving to prints.
In the next few years, two more important influences appeared: paintings by Edward Burne-Jones and Japanese woodblock printing. He was only seventeen when his painting Lady of Shalott was approved for exhibition at the Royal Academy, yet his later works were refused and he continued exhibiting only 15 years later when the Grosvenor Gallery opened. Some might say that happened for a simple reason. Walter Crane was without formal education and while he admired works of the Italian Renaissance, he was very likely more influenced by the Elgin marbles which are still clearly seen in Walter Crane's so-called toy books.
Yes, in the meantime (he was only twenty) he started illustrating six pence books for Edmund Evans, where he had an opportunity to imitate the works of old Japanese masters in completely new settings and a media which still had to be born - picture books for kids, printed on large scale and available to (well, almost) everybody.
The commercial success of Edmund Evans' toy books was huge and Walter Crane was probably the most important key element in this achievement (Evans also employed Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway as two eminent artists of the same time) but his international success was somehow slowed down for several reasons.
One of them was definitely Crane's political activity. He firmly believed in the idea of socialism and supported the cause with articles, public appearances, and illustrations of pamphlets. While he never became an anarchist, he didn't approve of the execution of four anarchists who set a bomb in Chicago in 1887. This closed all the business possibilities for Walter Crane in America.
The other reason was probably some kind of clash with Edmund Evans who was very profit-oriented and often cut corners with the artistic works of his illustrators to put them in different commercially interesting projects which were sometimes pretty out of context from the artistic point of view.
How important was Walter Crane is obvious from the covers, which present his name (before that, illustrators of the book were in most cases anonymous) but not the name of the authors (like Brothers Grimm, Madame Leprince de Beaumont, or Madame d'Aulnoy).
Demand for his skills was rising. Crane was commissioned for the interior design of houses of important people of the time, like Alexander Constantine Ionides, Sir Frederick Leighton, Dr. William Spottiswoode, the President of the Royal Society, and Catherine Wolfe. How versatile and engaged in everyday life Walter Crane was is obvious from his numerous involvements in different movements of the time. He was, for instance, a vice president of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union which promoted loose-fitting clothing as an answer to the then-normal 'stiff and tight' dresses.
A very important work by Walter Crane was also The Renaissance of Venus, which was exhibited in the prestigious Paris Salon in 1878. While he was never accepted into some formal societies due to his lack of formal education and political views, his influence was tremendous and important even many decades after his death in 1915.