Randolph Caldecott

Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886) was a British artist and illustrator, born in Chester. Caldecott greatly influenced the illustration of children's books during the nineteenth century. Two books illustrated by him, priced at a shilling each, were published every Christmas for eight years.

Caldecott also illustrated novels and accounts of foreign travel, made humorous drawings depicting hunting and fashionable life, drew cartoons and he made sketches of the Houses of Parliament inside and out, and exhibited sculptures and paintings in oil and watercolour in the Royal Academy and galleries.

From his early childhood, Caldecott drew and modelled, mostly animals. His main education came with five years at the King's School, Chester, a grammar school then in the cathedral precinct in the city centre, which he left at the age of fifteen. In that same year, 1861, he first had a drawing published, a sketch of a fire at the Queen Hotel, Chester which appeared in the Illustrated London News, together with his account of the blaze.

On leaving school, Caldecott went to work as a clerk at a bank. When he was out on errands, he was either walking or riding around the countryside, and many of his later illustrations incorporate buildings and scenery of nearby Cheshire and Shropshire.

Caldecott's love of riding led him to take up fox hunting, and his experiences in the hunting field and his love of the chase bore fruit over the years in a mass of drawings and sketches of hunting scenes, many of them humorous.

After six years at Whitchurch, Caldecott moved to the head office in Manchester of the Manchester & Salford Bank.  He took the opportunity to study at night school at the Manchester School of Art and practiced continually, with success in local papers and some London publications. 

Encouraged by this evidence of his ability to support himself by his art, Caldecott decided to quit his job and move to London in 1872 at the age of 26. Within two years he had become a successful magazine illustrator working on commission. His work included individual sketches, illustrations of other articles, and a series of illustrations of a holiday which he and Henry Blackburn took in the Harz Mountains in Germany. The latter became the first of a number of such series.

He remained in London for seven years, spending most of them in lodgings at 46 Great Russell Street just opposite the British Museum, in the heart of Bloomsbury. While there he met and made friends (as he did very readily) with many artistic and literary people, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George du Maurier (who was a fellow contributor to Punch), John Everett Millais, and Frederic Leighton. His friendship with Frederic (later Lord) Leighton led to a commission to design peacock capitals for four columns in the Arab room at Leighton's rather exotic home, Leighton House, in Kensington. (Walter Crane designed a tiled peacock frieze for the same room.)

In 1869, Caldecott exhibited a picture in the Royal Manchester Institute. He had a picture exhibited in the Royal Academy for the first time in 1876. He was also a watercolourist and was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1882.

In 1877, Edmund Evans, who was a leading colour printer using coloured woodblocks, lost the services of Walter Crane as his children's book illustrator and asked Caldecott for illustrations for two Christmas books. The results were The House that Jack Built and The Diverting History of John Gilpin, published in 1878. They were an immediate success; so much so that Caldecott produced two more each year for Evans until he died. 

In 1879, Caldecott moved to Wybornes, a house near Kemsing in Kent. It was there that he became engaged to Marian Brind, who lived at Chelsfield about seven miles away. They were married on 18 March 1880 and lived at Wybornes for the next two years. There were no children of the marriage. In the autumn of 1882, the Caldecotts left Kent and bought a house, Broomfield, at Frensham in Surrey; they also rented No 24 Holland Street, Kensington. By 1884, sales of Caldecott's Nursery Rhymes had reached 867,000 copies (of twelve books) and he was internationally famous.

Caldecott's health was generally poor and he suffered much from gastritis and a heart condition going back to an illness in his childhood. It was his health among other things that prompted his many winter trips to the Mediterranean and other warm climates. It was on such a tour in the United States of America in 1886 that he was taken ill again and died. He and Marian had sailed to New York and travelled to Florida in an unusually cold February; Randolph was taken ill and died at St. Augustine. He was not quite 40 years old. A headstone marks his grave in the cemetery there.

Soon after his early death, his many friends contributed to a memorial, which was designed by Sir Alfred Gilbert. It was placed in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, London. There is also a memorial to him in Chester Cathedral.