|
|
| Home | About this site | Author index | Awards and prizes | News | Events |
 |
|
|
|
||||||
|
 |
|
Raymond BriggsRaymond Briggs
Back |
Genres |
Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
BiographyRaymond Briggs was born in London in 1934, and studied at Wimbledon School of Art and the Slade School of Art, London. His first work was in advertising, but he soon began to win acclaim as a children's book illustrator as well as teaching illustration at Brighton College of Art.
He came to public attention when he illustrated a book of nursery rhymes, The Mother Goose Treasury, in 1966, winning a Kate Greenaway medal. Since then he has become one of the most innovative and popular author-illustrators.
As well as illustrating books for authors such as Allan Ahlberg, Raymond Briggs has written and illustrated many of his own books, including the hugely successful children's strip illustration books Father Christmas (1973) and The Snowman (1978). These books have been translated into many languages and adapted into films, plays and TV cartoons. A further strip illustration book, Ethel & Ernest (1998)- a biography of his parents' lives - tells the story of how his father met his mother, a lady's maid, and how they continued to live in the same house for forty-one years.
Raymond Briggs also writes books for adults: When the Wind Blows (1982), a grim satire on nuclear war, which has also been made into a play and a film, and The Tin Pot Foreign General and The Old Iron Woman (1984), an attack on the Falklands war.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Children, Graphic Novels, Illustration
BibliographyPeter and the Piskies (illustrator) Oxford University Press, 1958 The Fair to Middling: A Mystery (illustrator) Hart-Davis, 1959 Look at Castles (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1960 The Secret of the Castle (illustrator) Oxford University Press, 1960 Look at Churches (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1961 Midnight Adventure (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1961 The Strange House (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1961 Ring-a-Ring o' Roses (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1962 Sledges to the Rescue (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1963 The White Land: A Picture Book of Traditional Rhymes and Verses (itor/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1963 Fee Fi Fo Fum: A Picture Book of Nursery Rhymes (itor/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1964 Whistling Rufus (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1964 The Hamish Hamilton Book of Magical Beasts (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1965 The Flying 19 (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1966 The Mother Goose Treasury (editor/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1966 Jimmy Murphy and the White Duesenberg (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1968 Lindbergh the Lone Flyer (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1968 Nuvolari and the Alfa Romeo (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1968 Richtofen: The Red Baron (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1968 The Christmas Book (illustrator) Heinemann, 1968 The Hamish Hamilton Book of Giants (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1968 First Up Everest (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1969 Shackleton's Epic Voyage (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1969 The Elephant and the Bad Baby (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1969 This Little Puffin (chapter headings illustrator) Penguin, 1969 Jim and the Beanstalk (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1970 The Tale of Three Landlubbers (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1970 Festivals (illustrator) Heinemann, 1972 The Fairy Tale Treasury (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1972 Father Christmas (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1973 The Forbidden Forest and Other Stories (illustrator) Heinemann, 1973 Father Christmas Goes on Holiday (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1975 Fungus the Bogeyman (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1977 The Snowman (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1978 Gentleman Jim (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1980 Fungus the Bogeyman Plop-up Book (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1982 When the Wind Blows (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1982 When the Wind Blows: A Play (based on book by author) Samuel French, 1983 The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1984 Building the Snowman (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1985 Dressing Up (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1985 The Party (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1985 Walking in the Air (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1985 All in a Day (illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1986 The Snowman: A Pop-up Book with Music (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1986 Unlucky Wally (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1987 The Snowman Storybook (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1990 The Snowman Tell-the-Time Book (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1991 Father Christmas: The Book of the Film (author/illustrator) Puffin, 1992 The Man (author/illustrator) Julia Macrae, 1992 Father Christmas Having a Wonderful Time (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1993 The Bear (author/illustrator) Julia Macrae, 1994 The Snowman: Things to Touch and Feel, See and Sniff (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1994 Father Christmas Games Book (author/illustrator) Hamish Hamilton, 1995 The Snowman: The Original Storybook with Activities for Young Learners of English (author/illustrator) Oxford University Press, 1995 Ethel & Ernest (author/illustrator) Cape, 1998 Fattypuffs and Thinifers (introduction) Jane Nissen, 2000 Ivor (author/illustrator) Channel 4 Books, 2001 Ivor the Invisible (author/illustrator) Channel 4 Books, 2001 The Adventures of Bert (with Allan Ahlberg) Viking, 2001 The Snowman in Cross Stitch (illustrator) Murdoch, 2001 Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age and his Search for Soft Trousers (author/illustrator) Cape, 2001 A Bit More Bert (with Allan Ahlberg) Puffin, 2002 Blooming Books (illustrator) Cape, 2003 The Fungus Big Green Bogey Book: Snot for the Faint-Hearted (author/illustrator) Puffin, 2003 The Puddleman (author/illustrator) Bodley Head, 2004 Collected Poetry for Children/Ted Hughes (illustrator) Faber and Faber, 2005 The Elephant and the Bad Baby (illustrator) Puffin, 2007
Prizes and awards1966 Kate Greenaway Medal The Mother Goose Treasury 1973 Kate Greenaway Medal Father Christmas 1977 Francis Williams Award for Illustration Father Christmas 1979 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award (USA) The Snowman 1979 Dutch Silver Pen Award (Netherlands) The Snowman 1982 Francis Williams Award for Illustration The Snowman 1992 British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year The Man 1992 Kurt Maschler Award The Man 1999 British Book Awards Illustrated Book of the Year Ethel & Ernest 2000 Nestlé Smarties Book Prize (shortlist) Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age and his Search for Soft Trousers
Critical PerspectiveNow in his 70th year, the author and illustrator Raymond Briggs has a unique status; his picture books and cartoon strip works have consistently been best-sellers, whether for adults or children. Even more importantly, they have a tremendous emotional impact on readers, and made them think about history, politics, family life and childhood. He has also consistently sought to expand the boundaries of children’s picture books – from his perennially popular The Snowman (1978) to more controversial works such as The Bear (1994) and The Man (1992). He has equally never been afraid of topical political issues, as in his irony at government preparations for nuclear war in When the Wind Blows (1982), or the savagely depicted protagonists of The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984), which appeared in the aftermath of the Falklands War; black and white sketches of soldiers being shot, burned alive and buried, juxtaposed with highly sexualized Ralph Steadman-like images. The culmination of his art in many ways is the highly acclaimed Ethel & Ernest (1998), his parents’ life stories being told in comic strip form against the social history of 20th century Britain through war and peace. Yet he is no humourless social realist; his other works have a cornucopia of caricature, wit, and literary parody. His great themes are the family, social justice, and the recalcitrant individual as in Gentleman Jim (1980), Unlucky Wally (1987) and The Man (1992).
Anyone requiring a detailed and lavishly illustrated account of Briggs’ development as an artist and social satirist need look no further than Nicolette Jones’ excellent study Blooming Books (Cape, 2003). Within it, the critic Philip Hensher describes Briggs’ work as ‘instantly recognizable, both in its warm look, and in its serious moral world. It is peculiarly English – his attractively fuzzy style draws … on a line of beautifully domestic and idealistic English artists, going back to the great Edward Ardizzone to Samuel Palmer’. In his foreword, Briggs himself remarks upon being influenced early on by newspaper cartoonists and Punch magazine. When he began to draw, he was interested in ‘above all, what the figure was doing and thinking and feeling … the illustrator is interested in the storytelling aspect of the picture’. (In his iconic work The Snowman, of course, there is no dialogue or text: the pictures alone move the drama forward). Having partly rejected the fine art tradition, Briggs always aspired to reach people: ‘I had always wanted to write for the press or draw for reproduction’.
His early career as a children’s book illustrator reached high points with The Mother Goose Treasury (1966), and Elfrida Vipont’s The Elephant and the Bad Baby (1969), a morally ambiguous tale in which a bad-tempered baby rides the thieving elephant and is chased by tradesmen all the way home. Briggs’ true originality as an author-illustrator began with gently debunking works such as Jim and the Beanstalk (1970), in which the giant is an avuncular figure helped by false teeth, spectacles and a wig, and his far from jolly Father Christmas (1973). In this strip cartoon we see Father Christmas as a working man, grumpily making preparations for delivering presents, cursing the weather, flying over Buckingham Palace and Westminster, and finally returning home to eat his festive meal, with only his pets for company, but counting his blessings. The Snowman has a similarly ordinary domestic setting, but it takes off into fairy tale and soaring fantasy. Rendered in soft pastel crayons, the small rectangular cartoon strip (as the boy makes the snowman, is greeted by him and then invites him into the house) gives way to much larger pictures as the two fly together in the snow-laden sky over the blue-and-green onion domes of the Brighton Pavilion. By the tiny end panel, the snowman has vanished, poignantly leaving the boy – and the readers - with only his hat and scarf.
With his hilariously angst-ridden Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), Briggs showed another side to his talent with this multi-faceted parody, a totally imagined alternative world starring a green creature with spiky hair - ‘a suitable hero for an age of punk’ (Nicolette Jones). ‘Bogeydom’ shows a child-like fascination with muck and murk, slime and smells, but centers upon an affectionate family: Fungus, wife Mildew and son Mold (whose bed is a giant sardine can). Fungus is another of Briggs’ working men, grumbling about his job of scaring ‘the drycleaners’; waking babies, plunging houses into darkness, and raising boils. He accepts his station in life, but asks: ‘Why am I a Bogeyman? … For slime’s sake WHY?’ This is Briggs’ most playful work, full of mock footnotes, comical reversals, asides to the reader, while ‘Bogeys frequently think in … misquotations’. The cultural highlight is Fungus’ visit to the ‘public liberality’, its shelves bulging with novels such as 'A Room with a Bogey', 'Cider with Bogey' and (my favourite) 'A La Recherché Du Bogeys Perdu': ‘Oh what dross! The richness of our literary heritage!’
The length of a graphic novel, Ethel & Ernest (1998) is necessarily his most personal work, as well as his most emotional. In telling his parents’ life stories – and part of his own – with a mix of comic and tragic episodes, he brought the strip cartoon to the condition of literature. It begins in 1928, with two wordless pages, as a lady’s maid unwittingly waves a duster at a passing cheery cyclist, and their married life together goes on to register social changes, world events and technological progress up to the start of the 1970s. In their aspirations, stoicism, arguments and care for each other, we overhear typical British attitudes to class, sex, education and party politics. Artistically rich and detailed, the text and pictures perfectly complement each other, leading to the final harrowing pages showing their deaths. Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age and his Search for Soft Trousers (2001) also touches upon the family, the generation gap and the class divide, but is back in the vein of humorous footnotes, asides and inspired anachronisms. Ug is the despair of his parents, with his constant questioning of their certainties – and his quest for soft trousers. He is a prototype artist, forever trying things out, and expanding his stone age vocabulary with words such as 'nice' and 'terrific'. The final page shows an already-maturing Ug, painting animals on the cave wall, and asking ‘Things WILL get better … won’t they?’
Briggs has recently returned to illustrating, with Alan Ahlberg’s interactive children’s books The Adventures of Bert and A Bit More Bert (2001-2), but his own latest, The Puddleman (2004) is another idiosyncratic work, about a child’s appreciation of a character who puts puddles in the ground. He has now achieved a subtle and expressive form, equally able to move and entertain us. He has, says Nicolette Jones, ‘elevated the standing of the art of strip illustration and added status to children’s books’.
Dr Jules Smith, 2004
Contact information
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
 |
|
|||||||
|
The British Council is registered in England as a charity. Our privacy statement. Our Freedom of Information Publications Scheme. |
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Developed and hosted by Artlogic Media Ltd London. | |
|||||||
|
|||||||||
