Life and career
Warwick Goble learned the business of making pictures for print from both ends. He studied at the Westminster School of Art and worked for a London firm that specialised in chromolithography, the production of colour images from separate printing surfaces. His early commissions were newspaper and magazine illustrations. Readers might encounter his drawings in Pearson’s Magazine one month and The Boy’s Own Paper the next.
In 1897 Pearson’s commissioned him to illustrate H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds as it appeared in instalments. The first British book edition omitted the drawings. Some appeared again in the American edition, giving readers on opposite sides of the Atlantic different pictures of Wells’s invaders. Later commissions for Macmillan brought him into a different publishing world, that of the illustrated gift book, with watercolours reproduced as full-page plates.
Work and ideas
One of his most extensive collaborations was with Grace James, whose Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales drew on stories she had heard as a child in Japan as well as printed sources. James supplied the narratives. Goble had to give each plate a subject that would stand on its own across the page from the text. The landscapes, clothing and supernatural figures belong to his English illustrated edition of these stories.
The range of sources he illustrated is easily overlooked. Alongside Green Willow were editions of Lal Behari Day’s Folk-Tales of Bengal, stories from the Italian Pentamerone and Dora Owen’s anthology The Book of Fairy Poetry. A reader following Goble across these books is following the career of one artist through several quite different traditions of storytelling.
