Angela Barrett: The Most Wonderful Thing in the World

 My last post in this series covered Angela Barrett’s earliest work (The Wild Swans) and this one examines her most recent: The Most Wonderful Thing in the World by Vivian French. It’s an original story, but one infused with a fairy tale ambiance in its illustrations of an Edwardian-era Venice. Though it has none of the symbolism or potency of our oldest tales, its sweet little love story manages to find a clever loophole in the familiar “most worthy suitor” clause.

Through dozens of little vignettes set alongside sweeping two-page vistas, Barrett creates an ornate Venetian city of villas, islands, canals and piazzas, where the Princess Lucia freely roams while her parents puzzle over the challenge they have set her potential suitors: to win their daughter’s hand, they must first be presented with the most wonderful thing in the world. Fittingly, the book is filled with possible answers to this riddle: automobiles and acrobats, gemstones and jewellery, exotic animals and optical illusions…

But my favourite illustration is the one that depicts the lowest point of the king and queen’s search. Dejected, they reach the private island of their advisor Angelo in search of their daughter, who has been spending her days with Angelo’s grandson Salvatore. I’m sure you can guess where this is going. It’s Salvatore, who has fallen in love with Lucia, who realizes the answer to her parents’ test: she is the most wonderful thing in the world.

This is the moment just before Salvatore’s revelation, in an otherwise small picture that is nevertheless so long it spreads across the bottom of two pages, but in doing so, conveys the spectrum of power at work throughout the story:

On the right is the king and queen; on the far right their royal barge and three trumpeters – all pomp and circumstance. On the left is old Angelo lifting his hat in greeting, followed by a pensive-looking Lucia, and finally, lagging behind, the despondent Salvatore, emerging from the confusion and gloom of the forested isle.

Significantly dividing them are three large trees, so big they break through the border that contains the rest of the image, but you can foresee that it’s here the two parties will meet, in the exact centre of the book, on the stone bench beneath the shade of the massive pines, conciliation close at hand.

It is a static illustration that is somehow in motion; like a photograph of a wave about to break. These people are moving towards one another – in more ways than one – and all their lives are about to change…