THE LATER YEARS

After decades of working with the earliest forms of color printing, from the engraved woodblocks of the toybooks to the six-color lithographs created for Hawthorne’s Wonder Book, Walter Crane turned to projects that were produced using “photographic color half-tone printing.” This method of breaking down color images is very similar to how almost all color imagery is printed today. This process enabled Crane to prepare illustrations in a more direct way than ever before, without concern for how an image would transfer, or how it would be interpreted by an engraver. The result is an image that is much more concerned with its own composition and depth, and its internal cohesiveness, than its relationship to the page design, an approach that Crane had championed forty years earlier. These later works did not indulge Crane’s skills as a designer but as an illustrator, in a manner similar to many books of the day—simple and direct in their text, with color plates providing the sole visual element.

Crane’s political views influenced his work until his death in March 1915. He interpreted socialist themes in his paintings and devoted a fair amount of time to providing political magazines with cover designs, illustrations, and cartoons.