Inspiring Young Readers
Charles Keeping
I first became aware of Charles Keeping as an illustrator well before I knew his name. Although he has quite a broad range of illustrative styles, his pen, ink and wash illustrations for the Oxford University Press and for the Folio Society were so distinctive that they were clearly by the same hand – even if I didn’t know who it was. In fact, his work is used in a whole range of books for children, young adults and older readers and he was capable of working in colour or monochrome and did warm and cosy as competently as challenging and scary.
Keeping was born in 1924 into a working class family in Lambeth and left school at 14. He was able to do an art correspondence course before the war but when he was discharged from the army in 1947 he got temporary jobs to fund his desire to go to art college. However, he had received a head injury during the war which deeply traumatised him and he suffered badly from depression that affected him throughout his life. Many people have pointed to this injury as a significant influence on his darker, more disturbing drawings and his sympathy for the macabre and the dark side.
He spent some time as a newspaper cartoonist before his break in book illustration came in 1954 when he got an introduction to the editor of the Oxford University Press and their children’s catalogue. He produced drawings for Rosemary Sutcliff and Henry Treece and, along with his colleague Victor Ambrus, pioneered a new and direct style of illustration that wasn’t afraid to confront the violence in these historical novels.
By the late 1960s Keeping was taking advantage of new printing techniques to produce superb colour illustration using big and bold blocks of colour – his work in the 1970s is archetypal of that period and is can be immediately recognised. However, in the 1980s Oxford tempted him back to using black and white and produced a whole series of books that used Keeping’s work as their key selling point.
His work also translated perfectly for adults when the Folio Society asked him to provide illustrations for their classic reprints. In particular he provided drawings for the works of Charles Dickens and these have now become classics in their own right. He also illustrated Emily Bronte, Victor Hugo and Dostoyevsky and this gave him the opportunity to work for the Swiss classic reprint publisher, Heron Books.
Tragically, Keeping died at the early age of 63 as the result of a brain tumour. His early death robbed us of a truly great – sometimes genuinely breathtaking – illustrator who would have undoubtedly have gone on to produce more groundbreaking work . We should be sad about this loss but equally we need to celebrate what he has left behind and spread the word about what an amazing artist he was.
Terry Potter
August 2016