Eleanor Vere Boyle (née Gordon)

Eleanor Vere Boyle, née Gordon (1825-1916), was a Scottish artist of the Victorian era whose work consisted mainly of watercolour illustrations in children's books. These illustrations were strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, being highly detailed and haunting in content. Love and death were popular subject matter of Pre-Raphaelite art and something that can be seen in Boyle's work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, even called her work "great in design".

Although she was one of the first women artists to be recognised for her achievements, she did not exhibit or sell work often as it was not acceptable, given her family's aristocratic background. Thus, she signed her works “EVB” to obscure her identity and quickly became one of the most important female illustrators in the 1860s.

Eleanor Vere Gordon was born in 1825 in Scotland, at Auchlunies House in Maryculter, Kincardineshire, (now Aberdeenshire), the daughter of Alexander Gordon of Ellon Castle, the illegitimate son of George Gordon, 3rd Earl of Aberdeen. Her mother, Albinia Elizabeth Cumberland, was the granddaughter of the dramatist Richard Cumberland and George Hobart, 3rd Earl of Buckinghamshire. The youngest of nine children, she was raised in the Scottish hills above the River Dee. She later moved to England and married Hon. Richard Cavendish Boyle, son of the 8th Earl of Cork and chaplain to Queen Victoria.

Boyle's fascination with nature strongly influenced her later work, which primarily consisted of garden books after her husband died. However, during her lifetime, up until she died in 1916, she was highly acclaimed for children's books. Eleanor had written or illustrated twenty-one books in about a fifty-year time-span. All these works were inspired by many things in which Eleanor was fascinated: nature, but also fate, dreams and flowing water.

Such fascinations were even more evident in her illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales in 1872, which was one of the earliest editions illustrated by an English person. Andersen had a definite dark side to many of his stories. With Boyle's ability to translate it into visual form with her own slightly sinister taste, this edition was made to be one of the most cohesive between illustration and writing.

Three years later, in 1875, Boyle created what is considered one of her greatest works, a retelling and illustration of the story Beauty and the Beast. This book includes ten full colour images. She is praised most for her unique take on the Beast. While this story has been illustrated many times, Boyle's version seems to be the first and only to be reminiscent of a sea-creature, with walrus-like tusks and flippers. This is different from the usual humanistic portrayal. Boyle veers away from all normalities of the character, lacking an upright position, human facial features and clothes.

Other notable works by Boyle are her illustrations in The Story Without an End and Child’s Play.