More on Walter Crane and drawing for woodblocks

Today I visited John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester to see the Walter Crane Archive. I was curious to see if any of the material there was linked to work Walter Crane (1845 – 1915) was commissioned to do for Mr Orr, who he writes, contracted him to do illustrations for the first edition of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (Crane, 1907 p.67). In the Archive I was only able to see material from 1865 to the early 1900s. Crane would have worked on drawings for Chambers just after his apprenticeship with W. J. Linton (1812 – 1897) ended in the early 1860s, so it would have been material around 1860-1862, which is consistent with when the first edition of the encyclopaedias were being produced. By then a Mr W.S. Orr (formerly of William S. Orr & Co. publisher and the former W. & R. Chambers London agent) was working in London on at least one project for the W. & R. Chambers firm (Cooney, 2006)*. Unfortunately, although I was not able to find a direct link, I did find some receipts in 1865 for work he was commissioned to do for Edmund Evans and the Dalziel Brothers. I can compare that to the salary paid to J. Stuart, an Edinburgh artist who was commissioned to draw wood for the Chambers firm and see the going rate for artists commissioned to make illustrations for books. Crane would have been quite young and early in his career in the 1860s. By 1891, he was very well known and I found a receipt showing him being paid £100 for one of his works, The Roll of Fate commissioned by the commissioned by the Grovenor Gallery. This was last on sale at Christie's for a few hundred thousand pounds.

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*Sondra Miley Cooney, “William Somerville Orr, London Publisher and Printer: The Skeleton in W. & R. Chambers’s Closet,” in Worlds of Print: Diversity in the Book Trade, ed. John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong (London: British Library, 2006), 135–47.