How an artist tossed between church and art and painted fairies: Cecile Barker

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Cecile Barker's works are well known to the Russian audience - usually without mentioning the artist's name. Adorable flower fairies, so similar to real children, inhabit book pages and postcards, they are illustrated by posts on the Internet and congratulations sent by e-mail … But behind these cute scenes there is a difficult struggle between creative freedom, earnings and … faith.

In the first half of the 20th century, art was more equal than ever. History knows many Russian and Western avant-garde artists, women designers and architects. One gets the impression that every story about women in art from the 1920s and 1930s is about a rebellion against social foundations, about a small personal revolution. However, one of the spheres of fine art - book illustration - did not demand battles and battles from the artists, confrontation with society and the entire male world. Book illustration allowed women to create their own fairy-tale worlds full of beauty and poetry, worlds where they could hide and find solace. And at the same time, it was the design of books and the creation of postcards that became an excellent source of income, allowing women to lead financially independent lives.

Cecile Barker is one of the brightest book illustrators of her time. Having started her career at the beginning of the 20th century as a young girl, she ended her career in the 60s, designing stained glass windows for churches. Cecile was a devout Anglican, and a huge part of her artistic heritage is associated with the activities of Christian organizations. But fame was brought to her by refined poetry collections, where the tale was intertwined with science - stories about plant fairies. She was the second daughter of Walter Barker, an amateur artist who made a living by selling seeds - her father apparently instilled in her a love for both art and botany. As a child, Barker suffered from epileptic seizures, she required special care and a specialized diet in accordance with the medical concepts of the time. She spent a lot of time at home in bed, devoid of ordinary childhood joys. Cecile had to entertain herself with drawing and reading books - certainly with pictures. Even then, she decided to become a book illustrator, and even then solitary reflections planted in her soul the seeds of a high religious feeling.

Cecile's art education began with correspondence courses, then she managed to enter the art school, where she later received the position of a teacher. Already at the age of sixteen, she was able to sell several of her illustrations to the publishing house, and a year later she received the first praise from critics. And during these years she was left without a father - the main breadwinner in the family. The sisters - Dorothy Barker was also fond of art - began to offer their work to magazines and yearbooks as illustrations. Cecile tried to publish her poems as well. However, the main help for them was … a kindergarten.

The enterprising Dorothy found a way out of the difficult financial situation that developed after the death of their father. She opened a private kindergarten - right in the house. And Cecile furtively drew children - their cheerful eyes, perky smiles, their pranks … In those years, Europe was overwhelmed by the fashion for fairies after the release of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Coming of the Fairies" and the story of JM. Barry about Peter Pan, and even the British royal family couldn't resist the charm of the tiny fairytale characters. And in 1918, Barker offered the publishing houses a series of postcards, where children from Dorothy's kindergarten in fancy clothes played hide and seek among flowers. In 1923, her first book was published - "Flower Fairies of Spring", where exquisite bright illustrations were accompanied by poems. During Barker's lifetime, three collections of poetry about fairies and several fairy tales were published.

Barker designed and made costumes for her little models herself, each outfit inspired by the flowers and leaves of a particular plant. The costumes were kept in a chest in her workshop along with the wings made of twigs and gauze, but not for long - after finishing work on a series of illustrations, she remade the costumes for new ones.

Cecile gave the originals of the drawings to her parents. In general, she often simply gave away her works - for example, portraits of parishioners of St. Andrew's Church in Croydon. This church was considered a refuge for the poor - people from the middle classes did not look there, but Cecile devoted a lot of effort to church life. The abbot said that without her the parish would have been closed a long time ago. Together with her sister, she made stained glass windows for the church, together they wrote religious poems and stories for local children …

Cecile was constantly worried that she was not doing enough for the church, for God. Back in the 1920s, she wanted to quit working on postcards and illustrations in order to focus entirely on church affairs - of course, her family dissuaded her. Cecile Barker's religious works were less popular, she herself did not want to sell them, but it is known that her painting of the infant Christ was bought by Queen Mary.

Barker was an excellent master of watercolors, pen and ink, oil and pastels. Despite the obvious influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, the artist argued that intuition and artistic instinct played the main role in her work. She did not support any fashionable artistic movement and at the same time rejected academic theories, relying only on her own taste, sense of style and imagination.

In the West, Barker is known primarily as a poet and writer. Each Barker poetry collection consists of twenty drawings with fairies of flowers and other plants, and each drawing has a corresponding poem. All plants are drawn from nature, and poems are devoted to the properties of plants. This is a kind of botany textbooks for children, narrated in poetic figurative language. In Russia, translations of her texts - eight collections of poetry - are carried out by the literary translator, candidate of philological sciences Elena Feldman, who defended her thesis on the work of Barker.