Angela Barrett: The Wild Swans

In dark times you have to seek out beautiful things: that which exists for the sole purpose of spurring contemplation, admiration, and tranquillity. This is a blogpost series I’ve been planning for a while now, in which I chose a particular illustration from a picture book by one of my favourite artists and look at it in more detail: the colours, the composition, the symbolism, all that jazz.

I have several illustrators in mind: Jackie Morris, Trina Schart Hyman, P.J. Lynch, Kinuko Craft, Jane Ray, Ruth Sanderson, and the plan is to work through all of their work as the mood takes me, looking at each of their published books and picking out the most impressive illustration in each one – or at least the one that speaks mostly strongly to me.

Lately I've been poring over the work of Angela Barrett, an illustrator I've loved for a long time now, though I've only recently been inspired to explore her back catalogue. One trip through the library records later, and I settled down to relax into her body of work, which largely consists of children's stories, with a particular emphasis on fairy tales.

This makes sense due to her ornate, delicate style. Every character takes on a somewhat formal, doll-like stance (in deep contrast to another favourite of mine, Trina Schart Hyman, whose figures are unfailingly sensual) often bringing to mind carefully arranged peg-dolls. This is not a criticism, as many of her pictures have the quality of miniatures: sometimes her details are so intricate that you have to bring the book closer to your face just to see them all.

Likewise, her landscapes evoke old-fashioned photographs or postcards: they can be immense and/or barren, perhaps featuring only a single glimpse of life in the form of a distant figure.

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The Wild Swans is a fascinating book, as it was Barrett’s first project as an illustrator, and you can see the stark difference between this and her later work in the thickness of the lines and the darkness of her colours, though the general style is still very distinctive.

People transformed into swans are to be found in the Brothers Grimm’s telling of The Seven Swans, which in turn was certainly based on the Irish myth of The Children of Lir, though the most famous story obviously the Germanic tale that inspired Swan Lake, and Hans Christian Anderson’s take on this much older material makes for a strange and powerful story.

There were plenty of striking images to chose from, though my favourite is the depiction of Elise in the prison cell with the sinister Archbishop that has accused her of witchcraft:

It reminds me of Frank Dicksee's La Belle Dame sans Merci, specifically regarding the power dynamic in which the person who ostensibly doesn’t have any power clearly wields all of it. The Archbishop stands and Elise sits, yet his shoulders are hunched and he slinks away in moral defeat as Elise points his way to the door, her eyes dark and accusing.

Yup, she’s definitely the one in charge here, and the heavenly sunlight filtering through the window of her cell only adds to the power imbalance. The little details are also lovely: the Archbishop’s robes are covered in dark bristly thorns, red flames and open eyes, each a respective symbol of Elise’s curse, the bishop’s evil stare and the fire that awaits her.

In contrast, Elise sits in her green dress, a feather tucked into her dishevelled hair, as reminders of the brothers she wishes to save.

The mice and thrush at the window are details straight from Han Christian Anderson's text, though if you look closely, the scribbles and dates etched into the stone wall of the cell are Barrett's. Even this early, she was creating striking images of famous fairy tales.