Brian Wildsmith (1930-2016) was an acclaimed, award-winning painter and illustrator.  He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art.  In 1962 he won the Kate Greenaway Medal for Illustration for Brian Wildsmith’s ABC.  In 2023, Oxford University Press, published Paws, Claws, Tails and Roars, a stunning gift book highlighting the breadth of Wildsmith’s art and introduced by former Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen. 

A new major exhibition, The World of Brian Wildsmith, is opening in Barnsley Museums and will run from 20 April to 21 September 2024. 

In this interview, we spoke with Simon Wildsmith about his father’s work and Clare and Rebecca provided us with insights into their favourites of their father’s books.

What do you remember about your dad’s technique, and how he produced his art?

Brian’s art supplies:

• ·        Handmade paper that always had a texture to it.
• ·        Windsor and Newton gouache paints for the bulk of the painting in the illustrations.
• ·        Old plates and jam jars for water and to mix his colours on.
• ·        Holbein oil pastels, to create marks and emphasise texture.
• ·        Indian ink.
• ·        Coloured pencils & crayons

Brian sometimes applied very thick, hardly diluted white gouache paint to the paper to create texture, to which he would then apply colour once it was completely dry. Sometimes he would add sand to liquid paper glue to create different textures before adding his colours. He might then use the flat edge of a razor blade to gently scrape off some of that coloured gouache, before adding more, or use kitchen roll to dapple or his fingers to smear. He worked very freely, often saying “there are no rules” and so he would engage in whatever it took to achieve the effect he was after. All these techniques would allow the incredible variety in depth of colour and tone in say, the texture of an animal’s skin or fur, the delicacy of a bird’s feathers, the subtle consistency of foliage, the character of landscape or just the wow factor of his graphics. 

He also enjoyed using collage, painting different colours and patterns on other pieces of paper. When dry he would cut out the shapes he wanted and stick them onto the main illustration when all the base paint was dry.

He used the very best quality sable paintbrushes in a number of different sizes, depending on what he was painting. He would keep them for years, changing their purpose as they wore down and aged.

Brian would draw the main lines of his illustrations with B, 2B or 4B soft pencils, before applying his paints. Other times he just painted the illustration or part of the illustration straight on to the paper.

He always bought the very best quality paint brushes and paints, often in nearby Italy, just 50 miles away.  It was one of his great twice-yearly pleasures, to get away alone to San Remo, where he was a valued customer, not only to a great old-fashioned arts supplier, but also to a restaurant that according to him, served the best Fettuccine with cream and Parmesan sauce he had ever tasted. Brian adored his food ! We were never sure exactly what came first. Had he really run out of ‘Tyrien Rose’ or did he just have to give in to the ‘Call of the Cream ?’

Brian was obviously very influenced by the natural world – was he a keen naturalist himself, do you have a sense of where this interest arose from?

Brian was hugely inspired by the natural world. He wanted to inform his audience about the world around them, and as such studied it in immense detail. If he could paint an animal with all the colours of the rainbow and still have you convinced of its veracity, that is in part because he had studied it so closely, down to its skeletal composition. Thereafter, nature, the natural world and all that mankind has created of great beauty were central to his inspiration.

Our parents, and we as a family, travelled a lot and every outing was an excuse for research - a quick stop at the side of a French country road here, to photograph a donkey by a beautiful 18th century barn, a coffee break there, in an Italian piazza to draw its Renaissance church. Observation and research were central to feeding his art and imagination. Equally, he had a substantial library of reference books covering all manner of subjects, from his beloved Renaissance artists to ornithology or Greek architecture…

Furthermore, regarding the myriad animals that populate his books, they serve as vehicles for communication. Children love animals and have a natural affinity with them which facilitates story-telling.

In many ways, much of Brian’s work feels more prescient now than ever, what do you hope new generations of readers will take from his work?

More prescient indeed! With Professor Noah’s Spaceship, already back in 1980, Brian was sounding the alarm about pollution and the degradation of our eco-systems. But he didn’t like to preach. His work is more suggestive, visually strong, but honouring a child’s natural ability to understand the essence of quite complex paintings in a way that adults often fail to do. He once said, ’I paint what I see with my eyes and feel with my heart.’ From the tiniest of little insects feasting on flowers, to the mightiest of mammals, his art is filled with the joy of all that is best about our world – a world that is rapidly changing but with children that are fundamentally the same as they ever were.

Brian was not concerned with passing trends in art & design, nor in making books about passing societal trends or preoccupations. His number one battle was to inspire kids to believe in the ‘possible’ and to help give them what he called ‘visual literacy,’ as this would reap rewards later in life. He was preoccupied with universal themes that have been the concern of humanity for centuries.

These themes around such things as compassion, kindness, generosity, sharing and the preservation of our planet have indeed become more urgent to assimilate as time goes by.

In the introduction to ‘Paws, Claws, Tails and Roars,’ Michael Rosen  talks about Klimt and Kokoshka do you have a sense of the artists and illustrators who inspired Brian’s approach?

Brian’s first love was for the art of the early Italian Renaissance, before the more academic preoccupations of perspective interfered with that wildly imaginative creativity of artists like Giotto, Duccio, Cimabue… It was in part this connection with, and visits to the fabulous church of Saint Francis in Assisi, that led to his book of the same name in 1995.

His second love was for the later art and architecture of the Renaissance, with Raphael, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Mantegna and Piero della Francesca being among his favourites. All the greats inspired and elevated him - Caravaggio, Leonardo, Goya, El Greco… The list is long! Moving on a few centuries to his own, he also much admired some Picasso, much Giacometti, Henry Moore, Mondrian, Dubuffet, Modigliani, Egon Schiele, Cézanne, David Hockney…

The afore-mentioned travels we embarked upon usually had destinations like Florence’s Uffizi, Milan’s Brera, the Scrovegni chapel in Padua and a multitude of other churches, cathedrals and museums dotted all over southern Europe. Brian was insatiable in his appetite for discovering as much art and architecture as possible and he wanted his children to be exposed to as many ‘miracles’ of creation as possible in a way that had not been possible in his own youth. We were very fortunate indeed.

Can you tell us about some of the process of bringing, ‘Paws, Claws, Tails and Roars’ to fruition?

Paws, Claws, Tails & Roars came about from an idea of Rebecca’s after Brian died in 2016. As an homage to his work and his dedication to OUP, she thought it would be a lovely thing to publish a gift-book with illustrations from his 1960’s trilogy, Birds, Fishes & Wild Animals. Seduced by the idea, and after much discussion about format, design and content, all the illustrations were then digitally remastered by Simon, a task he had previously undertaken to revitalise a number of other titles such as the ABC, Hunter and his Dog, Professor Noah’s Spaceship, The Bible Stories. Debbie Sims was commissioned to write the lovely new text. 

Michael Rosen would have been approached by OUP, knowing that he was a fan of Brian’s work. We were thrilled and delighted that he accepted to write such an insightful and interesting forward. 

Brian won the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration in 1962 for Brian Wildsmith’s ABC – what did this mean to him?

Winning Britain’s most prestigious children’s books award for his very first book must have been a tremendously exciting thing indeed. What a start for an original creator! I say ‘must have been’ because Clare and Rebecca were very young when this happened and Simon and Anna weren’t yet born. I remember reading how he didn’t set out to do something revolutionary. He just wasn’t bound by convention or aware of the constraints. He just painted his subjects the way he wished, which takes us back to his painting with his heart. How clearly that shines in those remarkable illustrations! Thereafter, in later years, he never mentioned it. He had a healthy ego and assurance about his worth mixed with the modesty one meets in the truly great.

Can you tell us about the forthcoming exhibition at Barnsley and what people can expect to see and experience?

The forthcoming Barnsley exhibition means the world to us. We are immensely proud of the whole project that has taken over 2 years to plan and work out. When we talked amongst ourselves about finding a venue to show all this amazing art and illustration of our father’s that had never before been seen by the public, Barnsley just seemed the obvious choice. Aged 19, Brian had escaped a grey, sooty, polluted and poor environment where the exploitation of miners, including his own father, was rife, to emerge, 13 years later, on the international children’s books scene in a rainbow explosion of colour. Barnsley and south Yorkshire have changed beyond all recognition since then and the time is right to take that rainbow back!

Do you have a favourite book by your dad, if so what is this and why?

Rebecca - The Owl and the Woodpecker, 1971.

I can distinctly remember as a young child, watching my father paint so many of the illustrations in this book. I seemed to relate to both of these birds. A very constructive woodpecker, who tapped away at his tree every day, not caring at all that the noise he made was badly affecting the nocturnal owl, who turned up to live in the neighbouring tree and who needed to sleep all day. 

As a young child watching the illustrations evolve, I very often felt like both of them. I was always building things and I was a huge sleeper, falling asleep wherever and whenever I could!

I was fascinated with wildlife and the vibrant colours of the woodpecker grabbed my attention, having never seen a real one. I was also very taken by the woodpecker’s kindness in saving his ‘arch enemy’ at the end of the story. What culminated in making this book my favourite, was the fact that when my father gave me a copy of the newly published book, I opened it, and there on the front-end paper of the copy I still have, I read: 

For darling Rebecca, who inspected every drawing and cleaned my studio - Daddy. Publication Nov 1971. 

Then turning the page to the half title page, there in print I read: 

The Owl and the Woodpecker 

For Rebecca

What more could an eleven-year-old possibly want!

(The Owl and the Woodpecker was commended by the Kate Greenaway committee in 1971.)

Simon - Paws, Claws, Tails & Roars, 2023.

Our father dedicated all his first books to his children, as and when they were born and so the calendar would have it that I got his trilogy of Fishes, Birds and Wild Animals. Having spent countless hours last year diving into every last detail of the illustrations, in order to ready them for this new and important gift-book, I fell in love with them anew. Each painting is wildly fresh, exciting and still so modern and made with such unerring conviction. It is quite simply awe inspiring.

Clare - A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1966.

A Child’s Garden of Verses allowed me to escape into my father’s wildly vivid imagination…take a look, the illustrations are exactly as Brian wished, “images which children would react to with joy and wonder.” That’s precisely what they do to me!

A big thank you to Simon, Clare and Rebecca Wildsmith.  Do consider visiting the exhibition of Brian’s work in Barnsley if you get the chance.