Biography

Leonard Leslie Brooke Biography

Leonard Leslie Brooke – British Illustrator and Author 1862-1940

Leslie Brooke

Leonard Leslie Brooke, whose droll pen- and-ink line drawings, enchanting watercolor illustrations, and beloved books about Johnny Crow and his friends have delighted generations of children and the grownups who read to them, was educated in his native Cheshire and later in London at the Royal Academy. He received the Academy’s Armitage Medal in 1888 and began his artistic career as a watercolorist and portrait painter, but when he succeeded Walter Crane in 1891 as illustrator of Mrs. Molesworth’s Victo­rian novels for children, his career took a differ­ent course.

With the publication of The Nursery Rhyme Book (1897), edited by Andrew Lang, Leslie Brooke found his niche among children’s book immor­tals. The pictures he drew with such skill and humor, that he painted with such warmth and color for his lovely books of Mother Goose rhymes and traditional nursery tales, class his art with that of Walter Crane, Beatrix Potter, Kate Greenaway, and Randolph Caldecott and his gently absurd humor with that of Ed­ward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Johnny Crow’s Garden (1903), the first book he both illustrated and wrote, earned a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in i960.

Johnny Crow, ever courteous, solicitous, and unassuming, plays quiet host to an intriguing assortment of fellow birds and animals in his beautiful garden. Rhymed couplets introduce his individual friends and their antics. The ac­companying pictures reveal further details of their stories until at last “they all sat down to­gether in a row in Johnny Crow’s garden.” The roots of this appealing classic for young children and of its companion books, Johnny Crow’s Party (1907) and Johnny Crow’s New Gar­den (1935), lie in childhood: Brooke’s own child­hood, that of his sons, and that of his grandson. The clever rhyming game shared among four generations produced three books equal in wit, beauty, and spirit that are filled with the character and personality Of their creator. Leslie Brooke was a kind and gentle man who loved and understood children. His sense of fun, his feelings for the English garden and countryside, and his affec­tion for animals are apparent in all his work.

Johnny Crow's Garden - Leslie Brooke 1903
Johnny Crow’s Garden – Leslie Brooke 1903

Leslie Brooke lavished his attention on portraying animals, not as an animal artist, but as a friendly observer of his fellow man. His humanized ani­mals, though true to their kind, express in their faces and bodies an enormous range of mostly sunny human emotions that children can in­stantly recognize. Whether from farm or jungle, they are happy, funny, silly, serious, surprised; coy, bored, sick, embarrassed, proud, crestfallen. To admire his animals, however, is not to slight his humans. The young kings and queens who grace his books are as royal and as beautiful as one could wish, the children as charming and innocent, but none would be recognized in the face of a neighbor. It is the lined and worn faces of his old folk that are a reminder of the artist’s early interest in portraiture.

The height of Leslie Brooke’s picture book creativ­ity was from the turn of the century to about 1916. During this period — besides the first two books about Johnny Crow—he created new il­lustrations for the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear, retold and illustrated four classic nursery tales that appeared both separately and later to­gether in The Golden Goose Book (1905), and il­lustrated a series of Mother Goose rhymes that were published in omnibus form in 1922 under the title Ring O’ Roses.

During the 1920s Leslie Brooke illustrated several books for adults. In the thirties the world re­ceived the gift of two more inspired children’s books from his hand. A Round-about Turn (1930), written by Robert Charles, had originally appeared as a poem in Punch and, like Lear’s nonsense verses, was in perfect tune with Brooke’s own whimsical art. Johnny Crow’s New Garden (1935), written for his grandson, was the astonishing equal of its two predecessors, writ­ten thirty years before.

In an age when humor, playfulness, and pic­torial detail in books for the young have reached a new level of appreciation, there is much to ap­preciate in the world of Leslie Brooke.

S.LR.

Source: Children’s Books and their Creators, Anita Silvey.

Leslie Brooke Bibliography

  • Everett-Green, E. – Miriam’s Ambition, Blackie 1889
  • —–The Secret of the Old House, Blackie, 1890
  •  MacDonald, G. – The Light Princess, Blackie, 1890
  • Rowsell, M. –Thorndyke Manor, Blackie, 1890
  • Armstrong, A. – Marian, Blackie, 1892
  • Thorn, I. – Bab, Blackie, 1892
  • White, R. – Brownies and Rose Leaves, Innes, 1892
  • Knatchbull-Hugessen, E. – A Hit and a Miss, Innes, 1893
  • White, R. – Moonbeams and Brownies, Innes, 1894
  • Strain, E. H. – School in Fairyland, Fisher Unwin, 1896
  • Walton, A. Penelope and the Others, Blackie, 1896
  • Molesworth, Mrs – Nurse Heatherdale’s Story, Macmillan, 1891
  •  —- The Girls and I, Macmillan, 1892
  • —- Mary, Macmillan, 1893
  • —- My New Home, Macmillan, 1894
  • —- Sheila’s Mystery, Macmillan, 1895
  • —- The Carved Lions, Macmillan, 1895
  • —- The Oriel Window, Macmillan, 1896
  • —- Miss Mouse and Her Boys, Macmillan, 1897
  • Lang, AndrewThe Nursery Rhyme Book, Warne, 1897
  • Browning, R. – Pippa Passes, Duckworth, 1898
  • Nash, T. – A Spring Song, J. M. Dent, 1898
  • Lear, Edward –  The Jumblies, Warne 1900
  • —- The Pelican Chorus, Warne 1900
  • Hayden, E. G. – Travels Round Our Village, Constable, 1901
  • Shakespeare, W. – Works, Constable, 1902
  • Brooke, L. L. Johnny Crow’s Garden, Warne 1903
  • Trollope, A. – Bar Chester Towers, Blackie 1903
  • —– The Story of the Three Little Pigs, Warne, 1904
  • —– Tom Thumb, Warne, 1904
  • Brooke, L. L. The Golden Goose Book, Warne, 1905
  • —— Johnny Crow’s Party, Warne, 1907
  • —— The House in the Wood, Warne, 1909
  • Hill, G. F. – The Truth About Old King Cole, Warne, 1910
  • Brooke, L. L. – The Tailor and the Crow, Warne, 1911
  • —— The Man in the Moon, Warne, 1913
  • —— Oranges and Lemons, Warne, 1913
  • —— Nursery Rhymes, Warne, 1916
  • —— Ring O’ Roses, Warne, 1922
  • Jacks, L. P. – Mad Shepherds, Williams & Norgate, 1923
  • Charles, R. H. – A Roundabout Turn, Warne, 1930
  • Brooke, L. L. – Johnny Crow’s New Garden, Warne, 1950

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