BARKER, Cicely Mary

Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairy books, published in the first half of the last century are known and loved around the world. They were created by a quiet, unassuming and dedicated artist, who was nevertheless remarkably successful, spending her life illustrating many children's books and selling hundreds of watercolours and pastels.

She was born in 1895 in Croydon, South London, and spent most of her life there. Because of ill-health she was educated at home and largely taught herself to draw and paint, encouraged by a supportive family and assisted by membership of the Croydon Art Society. She was only sixteen when she had her first work accepted for publication as a set of postcards, and from that time she devoted her career to painting.

It was her Flower Fairies books that brought her greatest popular acclaim. Like the pre-Raphaelite painters whom she so much admired, she believed in recreating the beauty of nature in art and in drawing from life. Her plants and flowers are observed with complete botanical accuracy, and in the fairies themselves she perfectly captured the unselfconscious grace of young children, whom she used to sketch in her sister's school. Her Flower Fairies watercolours have a unique combination of naturalism and fantasy which no imitators have matched.

Ref. Cicely Mary Barker and Her Art by Jane Laing.

Search for items related to this biography