During his short life Randolph Caldecott became one of the most popular and respected illustrators of his era. Working at the height of Victorian Aestheticism and industrialization, he turned for inspiration to nature and the stable rural society of eighteenth-century England. His skill lay in translating minutely observed scenes of people, animals and everyday events into drawings and paintings executed with a masterly economy of line and an unsurpassed feeling for color. He had a rare humor which saw all the folly and vanity of man, yet portrayed them with frankness and love. Rodney Engen charts Caldecott's life from his humble beginnings in a small village and his early life as a bank clerk. His talent soon brought him commissions from the Graphic, Illustrated London News and The Pictorial World and he was a regular contributor to these and other periodicals throughout his career. Caldecott's most important contribution to English illustration, however, was his famous series of children's Picture Books, superb editions of illustrated nursery rhymes and stories, engraved and color-printed by that master of his trade, Edmund Evans. The House that Jack Built and John Gilpin were published in 1878, the first of sixteen titles to appear over a period of eight years. The Picture Books were subsequently published in many editions, winning Caldecott international renown and earning him the epithet "Lord of the Nursery". In this volume Rodney Engen has brought together for the first time a comprehensive selection of Caldecott's work, including not only his best-known illustrations to books and periodicals, but also his less-familiar oil paintings and sculpture, together with a complete catalog of Caldecott's oeuvre. Mr. Engen is an authority on illustrators of the Victorian era, his first book being an illustrated account of Caldecott's contemporary, Walter Crane. His Kate Greenaway has recently been published in the same series and he is currently engaged on a full-scale, definitive biography of this artist. - Jacket flap.