Enchanted World: Pictures to Grow Up With (review)

Strictly speaking, this book, and those following, fall outside the category of "fantasy illustration." But as its title indicates, Holmes' presentation of art to young viewers stresses the dreamlike, poetic, and wonderful. "How exciting it is," Holmes observes, "to find an artist's flight of fancy carrying us, as if on a magic carpet, to an enchanted world we never imagined before." It is the romance of painting, rather than an emphasis on historical development, style, or technique (although some attention is paid to such matters) that Holmes conveys. The extensive use of details, rather than greatly reduced full paintings, contributes to the mysterious life of the images here. The subjects, too, have an air of fantasy, and seem often to belong to some fascinating, unwritten story. Dragons, saints, princes, marvellous gardens (Bosch) and dreamscapes (Rousseau) feature here. Magritte, Dali, Klee, medieval and Eastern artists contribute their strange and haunting images. The reader will find more familiar pictures too, from Tenniel, Potter, Rackham, Crane, Caldecott, Eleanor Vere Boyle, Harry Clarke and Richard Doyle, as well as some of the greatest names in the history of painting. Generous use of color, fine, clear reproduction, and open layout within dimensions still convenient to hold, make this a splendid and lively book.

A more specialized collection that may tempt older readers is Painters of Fantasy, with an introduction by William Gaunt (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1974). Brief but informative notes accompany the reproductions (two-thirds in color) in this oversized (11 x 16 ) paperback volume. From Mantegna and da Vinci to Magritte and Dali: 104 strange and surrealistic paintings to ponder. Fantastic Art (New York: Ballantine, 1973) suffers from the defects of other books edited by David Larkin: lack of scholarly apparatus, indifferent color reproduction, and in this case, detail-obliterating image reduction. Simon Watney's Fantastic Painters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977) is a superior effort; but as in Larkin's book, the art here tends towards the more explicitly sexual and disturbing. While Holmes's approach makes both the narrative and the fantasy elements in his various selections evident, the special focus of the other three does not bring them perceptibly closer to fantasy illustration.

Time spent with all four books, however, may bring the viewer closer to a grasp of the elusive nature of fantasy itself.