Charles Keeping

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Charles Keeping bigraphy, stories - British illustrator and children's author

Charles Keeping : biography

22 September 1924 – 16 May 1988

Charles William James Keeping (22 September 1924 – 16 May 1988) was a British illustrator, children’s book author and lithographer. He first came to prominence with his illustrations of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels for children, and he created more than twenty picture books. He also illustrated the complete works of Charles Dickens for the Folio Society.

Keeping won two Kate Greenaway Medals from the Library Association for the year’s best children’s book illustration, for his own story Charley, Charlotte and the Golden Canary (1967) and for a new edition (1981) of Alfred Noyes’s poem "The Highwayman". For the 50th anniversary of the Medal (1955–2005), a panel named his edition of The Highwayman one of the top ten winning works, which composed the ballot for a public election of the nation’s favourite. He also illustrated The God Beneath the Sea, by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen, which won the 1970 Carnegie Medal for children’s literature.

His lithographs have been exhibited in London, Italy, Austria and the U.S., including at the 1958 Fifth International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography in Cincinnati. He has prints in many collections, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Published work

His first published work was a comic strip in a newspaper, the Daily Herald, which he drew for four years, beginning in 1952. He didn’t much enjoy it, not seeing himself as a cartoonist, but despite this he also drew cartoons for the Jewish Chronicle, was political cartoonist for the Middle Eastern Review for a time, and later contributed to Punch magazine.

His first book was a humorous health-promotion book called Why Die of Heart Disease? in 1953, and he illustrated a number of educational textbooks, but his breakthrough came in 1957 when he illustrated Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical children’s novel The Silver Branch, which he would later refer to as his "first book". His drawings were vigorous and played with the conventions of size and placement within the text, and he would go on to illustrate many more children’s novels by Sutcliff, Henry Treece, Charles Kingsley, Alan Garner, Geoffrey Trease, Charles Causley, Kevin Crossley-Holland and many others. Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen’s retelling of Greek myths, The God Beneath the Sea, which Keeping illustrated in 1970, won the Carnegie Medal for that year.

He also worked on adult novels, including editions of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. In 1964 he began an association with the Folio Society with an edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. He made no secret that he didn’t like the book, but nonethess produced twenty-two two-colour lithographs for a publisher who only wanted, and was only prepared to pay for, twelve. The lithographs were sweeping, expressionistic and emotionally charged. He took a similar approach for Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and others.

In 1966 he created his first picture books, Black Dolly and Sean and the Carthorse, both about mistreated working horses. He followed these with the stunning Charley, Charlotte and the Golden Canary (Oxford, 1967), a modern fairy tale about two children who grow up in the same street, are separated when one family moves to a new tower block, and are reunited thanks to a pet canary. It depicts the gradual disappearance of the London of Keeping’s childhood, a theme he would persistently revist. The full-colour illustrations are excitingly messy and spontaneous, using intense colour, sponge texturing and wax resist, and won Keeping his first Greenaway Medal. Kirkus concluded a very short review, "Intense colors in striking combinations overwhelm the minimal story."

Kevin Crossley-Holland (1982), Beowulf, illustrated by Keeping