August Activities

Taking a break / The art of Raymond Briggs

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A later-than-usual post this week to say: I’m taking a fortnight off for August activities with the family. During this time, I’ll also be pausing paid subscriptions, and keeping them paused for two weeks when I return — in other words, I’ll be extending all paid subscriptions by a month, as a thank-you for reading over the last year.

I’m very grateful to have readers to share my reading with, which is how I’ve come to think of this newsletter. Poetry is the only thing I read often enough to write about on a weekly basis. But I do sometimes write about other things — most recently, a show about the artistic career of the illustrator, Raymond Briggs. The following review appeared last month in the summer issue of Prospect magazine (and the show is on until the end of October is you happen to have a couple of hours free in Sussex).

The first thing that greets visitors to the Raymond Briggs retrospective at Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in Sussex is a spectacular political vindication of the British art school. Promoted to boost Victorian trade, the founding aim of institutions such as Brighton Art School — where Briggs taught from the 1960s to the 1980s — was “to compete more successfully with the foreign workman… when the public require some sort of ornament and elegance about the commonest article”. How happy the local dignitaries who raised funds to build the school would have been to see a glass cabinet packed with gleaming ceramic merchandise — egg cups, teapots, figurines — spun off from Briggs’s most successful picture book, The Snowman (1978). “In 1995,” the information panel notes, “The Snowman was even used to advertise chicken nuggets in Japan.”

How Briggs would have felt about this is another matter. Among the items on display is a mock scroll declaring to his publicists that “Master Raymond Briggs (Craftsman)” will do “NO MORE INTERVIEWS” about The Snowman, “In This Life or The Next.” Briggs had a proudly defiant sense of himself as a craftsman at heart. Applying to Wimbledon School of Art at 15, he told the principal that he wanted to be a cartoonist and was indifferent to the “huge snobbery” that distinguished between “fine” art and “commercial” drawing.

That said, in a video interview here he also recalls his outrage when his first editor asked: “How do you feel about fairies?” After national service, Briggs had pursued ambitions to be a painter at the Slade, “studying Piero della Francesca… Fairies!” he grimaces. But original pages from his picture books show how fairies were the making of him. Briggs’s personal taste in painting was less Italian Renaissance and more the humdrum realism of “the Northern School —Brueghel, Rembrandt”. His playful early illustrations for books of nursery rhymes and fairy tales show him combining a love of the ordinary with a cartoonist’s opportunism. In Fee Fi Fo Fum (1964) he develops the comic-strip storytelling that would become his signature mode, applying deadpan logic to household objects in fantasy worlds. The tray of tarts made by the Queen of Hearts, for example, is a thin white rhombus of jam blobs indistinguishable from the Five of Hearts.

The first book that Briggs both wrote and illustrated, Jim and the Beanstalk (1970), is represented by a page showing Jim gazing at the giant’s castle and thinking, ‘“I hope they’ve got cornflakes.” On the other side of the gallery wall, his snot-green, scrotum-faced grotesque, Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), breakfasts among boxes of FLAKED CORNS and GOLDEN WAXY BITS. The wordplay of Fungus satisfied Briggs’s literary side, but it also added to his workload: hand-lettering each page with disgusting little puns took hours. The wordless, wintery simplicity of The Snowman the following year, done in dreamy soft pencil crayon, must have been a relief.

Another document on display states: “I am against exhibiting original book illustrations.” Briggs begins with the risk of loss, but it’s clear that his main concern—sternly underlined—is the reading experience: “The book itself is the ‘work of art’”, to be “held in the hand, horizontally”. Yet his care for detail means that there is still much to be relished in these vertically displayed “fish out of water”. Any lover of his majestic Father Christmas (1973) will be thrilled by the freshness of the ink-and-wash Christmas Eve spreads, surrounded by neat little working notes (“deers in deep shadow”).

The fine details of Briggs’s books reflect an abiding love for his working-class childhood. To an editor’s request for Christmas wreaths on the doors of a Wimbledon terrace he replies, “NO — MIDDLE CLASSES ONLY”. The milkman who nods to Father Christmas is a cameo of his Dad — who, along with his Mum, got a full-length portrait in oils on a cupboard in Briggs’s South Downs home, two miles from Ditchling. 

This show is not a revelation: much of what can be gleaned here can also be found in Nicolette Jones’s fine illustrated study from 2020 — although not the affectionate tributes of cartoonist Steve Bell, who made John Major into “The Snoreman” for Private Eye in Christmas 1993. And it is worth the price of admission alone to be able to leaf through a facsimile of the Finnish edition of The Snowman that the octogenarian Briggs annotated with typical sharpness in 2014. Some readers, apparently, mistook a snowy Brighton Pavilion for Russia: “Can’t they see the British bobby with his helmet?”