Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp
by CRANE, Walter, Photo
The picture shows two pages from Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp, one of Walter Crane’s ‘toy books’. In these books, Crane introduced new levels of artistic sophistication to the art of illustration. In the 1870s, his designs show the influence of Japanese prints in the use of flat areas of colour and simple, often asymmetrical compositions, and also of classical sculpture in the figures and draperies. They also display the styles and schemes of decoration associated with the emergent Aesthetic Movement.