From technical study to illustration
Harold Robert Millar was born in Scotland in 1869 and came from Thornhill in Dumfriesshire. He initially pursued civil engineering before choosing an artistic career. Training at Wolverhampton Art School and Birmingham School of Art prepared him for work in a growing market for illustrated magazines and books.
Millar contributed drawings to Punch, The Strand Magazine and The Idler. Published credits document his working career more clearly than his private life, about which the short biographical accounts give limited information.
His illustration work extended beyond children’s fantasy. He supplied pictures for Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and literary works by George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1927 he published The Dreamland Express, which he both wrote and illustrated. He died in 1942.
Working with E. Nesbit
Millar illustrated several of Nesbit’s best-known books, including Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Book of Dragons. Their encounters between children and fantastic creatures gave him opportunities to place impossible events in familiar settings.
The Magic World, first published in 1912, credits illustrations to both Millar and Spencer Pryse. The held reading edition preserves that joint credit. Signed drawings identify Millar’s contribution to its opening story, The Cat-hood of Maurice.
Nesbit’s story makes a boy exchange places with a cat he has tormented. Millar shows Maurice confronting Lord Hugh across an ordinary table, with an open book beside the animal. The boy’s cap, overcoat and paper suggest a routine departure interrupted by the cat’s astonishing proposal. The scene makes the change of perspective begin in the middle of domestic life.
