Hans Tegner. Fairy Tales (Word Edition). Denmark 1900.
We all know what happens when a group of art students sit round a model to draw: each represents the model according to his own viewpoint and his own ability. Together they will give the whole model, but fragmented; something will be missing from each of the pictures, even the ablest, and some may render the person as a composition of primary geometrical forms.
I t will be no different when many artists illustrate the same text, such as a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. The place, time, style and intention of each will impart his character to the Andersen situation or person. What adjectives one will apply to this character are another matter.
A handful of Andersen’s tales, merely in Danish and in book form, muster more than twenty illustrators, and they are very largely the same tales that have gone furthest internationally, to a hundred languages and countless artists.