Charles Keeping

Charles William James Keeping (22 September 1924 – 16 May 1988) was an English illustrator, children's book author and lithographer.

He made the illustrations for Rosemary Sutcliff's historical novels for children, and he created more than twenty picture books.

He also illustrated the complete works of Charles Dickens for the Folio Society.

In 1942, when he turned 18, he joined the Royal Navy as a wireless operator, serving four years.

He returned to civvy street in 1946 with a profound depression and a belief that a head wound he had sustained had disfigured him on the inside as well as (temporarily) on the outside, and would cause him to turn evil like Dr Jekyll becoming Mr Hyde.

He received treatment, was institutionalised for a time, and made a full recovery, but perhaps his sympathetic visual treatment of Grendel, the monster from Beowulf, owes something to this period of his life.

He applied for a grant to study art at the Regent Street Polytechnic, but was initially turned down, so he read meters for a gas company during the day and took art classes in the evening.

He finally got his grant and studied full-time from 1949 to 1952, completing the two-year Intermediate Examination in six months before specialising in illustration and lithography.

His teachers included illustrators Stuart Tresilian and Nigel Lambourne, and lithographer Henry Trivick.

He also worked as a life model, and on one such occasion in 1949 his demonstration of the functions of the muscles of the back attracted the eye of Renate Meyer, a fellow student who had left Germany with her family in 1933.

They married in 1952 and four children.

Keeping went freelance after graduation, and spent four years drawing a comic strip for the Daily Herald, but did not enjoy the editorial restrictions he had to work under.

He also drew cartoons for the Jewish Chronicle, the Middle Eastern Review, and, later, Punch, and his first book commission was a series of cartoon illustrations for a humorous health-promotion book called Why Die of Heart Disease? in 1953.

He also did some work in advertising, and illustrated some educational textbooks.

For the 50th anniversary of the Medal (1955–2005), a panel named his edition of The Highwayman one of the top ten winning works, which composed the ballot for a public election of the nation's favourite.

In 1956 he began to work through the artist's agent B. L. Kearley Ltd, whose rep Patsy Lambe referred him to Mabel George, editor of children's books at Oxford University Press.

George commissioned him to illustrate Rosemary Sutcliff's historical children's novel The Silver Branch.

He was unenthused by the ancient Roman subject matter, but experimented with double page spreads and drawings in the margins, and was quickly assigned more books by Sutcliff and others, including Henry Treece.

This began a professional relationship with Oxford University Press, for whom he illustrated more books than for any other publisher.

Keeping, along with Victor Ambrus, established a new, exuberant style of illustration for children's historical fiction, refusing to shy away from the violence of warfare.

His lithographs have been exhibited in London, Italy, Austria and the U.S., including at the 1958 Fifth International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography in Cincinnati.

He has prints in many collections, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Charles Keeping was born and grew up in Lambeth, London, in a terraced house that housed three generations.

He lived in an inner city environment of street markets and working horses that would inform his work his entire life.

Charles and his elder sister, Grace, drew and made up stories from an early age, on surplus newsstand placards brought home by their father, Charles Keeping senior, who distributed newspapers to shops and newsstands in the area and boxed under the name Charlie Clarke.

He later described his upbringing as "comfortable working class".

He attended the Frank Bryant School for Boys in Kennington, North London, leaving at the minimum age of 14, after which two of his aunts paid for him to take a correspondence course in art.

He took a job with the book printing company William Clowes & Sons, and after the outbreak of the Second World War joined Durrants, an engineering company producing munitions.

He also spent some time working as a gasman.

From the later 1960s Keeping, alongside illustrators like Brian Wildsmith and John Burningham, took advantage of advances in printing technology to move from black and white work to adventurous colour techniques.

In 1966 he created his first full-colour picture books, Black Dolly and Sean and the Carthorse, both about mistreated working horses.

He followed these with Charley, Charlotte and the Golden Canary, a modern fairy tale about two children who grow up in the same street, are separated when one family moves to a new tower block, and are reunited thanks to a pet canary, which depicts the gradual disappearance of the London of Keeping's childhood, a theme he would persistently revisit.

The full-colour illustrations are messy and spontaneous, using intense colour, sponge texturing and wax resist, and won Keeping his first Greenaway Medal.

Kirkus Reviews concluded a very short review, "Intense colors in striking combinations overwhelm the minimal story."

Keeping created 15 full-colour picture books for Oxford University Press, and several for other publishers.

Keeping won two Kate Greenaway Medals from the Library Association for the best children's book illustration of the year, for his own story Charley, Charlotte and the Golden Canary (1967) and for a new edition (1981) of Alfred Noyes's poem "The Highwayman".

Joseph's Yard (1969) and Through the Window (1970), two of his finest, were also produced as short films for the BBC's "Storyline" programme.

He also illustrated The God Beneath the Sea, by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen, which won the 1970 Carnegie Medal for children's literature.

Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen's retelling of Greek myths, The God Beneath the Sea, which Keeping illustrated in 1970, won the Carnegie Medal for that year.

For his contribution as a children's illustrator Keeping was a runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1974.