Oliver takes a detailed look at another seasonal artwork, which was designed by Walter Crane. Why not celebrate the Autumn Equinox by getting stuck in with the free colouring sheet Oliver has created from this piece?

Hello again! You might recognise this design from another colouring sheet post, featuring February’s design and a short history of Valentine’s Day. I can’t believe Autumn is once again just around the corner. The days are getting shorter, the morning air feels crisp, harvest season is here and it’s time for another colouring sheet based on a Walter Crane calendar design! While the last design from this series was a draft for the front cover, this one is based on one of the final designs. It features a rather beautiful and highly detailed border, which reminds me of art nouveau despite pre-dating the movement by well over a decade (and was lots of fun to trace!), as well as closer attention to detail in the central image. I particularly love the poppies, the golden ink used to print the background, and the characters’ gentle expressions, more refined than those in February’s bolder, more expressive print. In case you haven’t already read February’s post, you can find it here.

This print by Walter Crane, produced in 1873 at the latest, is a design from “The Year and its Festivals”, published in 1874. Though we know little about the book, it is possible it incorporated greetings cards – we have a few of these in our collection, and although they are separate, they are clearly a part of the same series.

On the ‘Christmas Day’ piece, we can see a reference to the publisher Marcus Ward & Co, who seem to have been known for publishing calendars, toy books and greeting cards. They also appear in other forms across museum collections, such as this Walter Crane calendar at the V&A. One of my favourite hobbies is antiquing, and I especially enjoy looking through the postcards and reading messages written on them many decades ago. I appreciate the gorgeous (though often not very legible) handwriting, and wonder what it would have been like to exist during that time – and whether the people who exchanged them really did have a nice holiday! As indoor activity season is heading our way, I expect I’ll be getting up to this a lot more in the near future, and I really hope that one day I will encounter one of these designs in the wild. 

I hope you enjoy this season’s colouring sheet as you get cosy this autumn. Make sure you leave us a comment, letting us know your favourite autumnal activities! – Oliver