Alphabet Flower Fairy - G is for Gorse

G is for Gorse.

Original Flower Fairy prints by Cicely Mary Barker, from a range of her first published books by Blackie and Co., dated from 1928-1940.

These delicate and beautiful prints have been carefully rescued from original damaged books, with each print over 80 years old. They have been lovingly mounted on antique white mounts and are ready to place into an A5 frame. The lithograph has a characteristic patina which is natural for vintage paper but every original book plate is in excellent condition.

The print comes complete with an A5 (21cm x 14.8cm) Antique white mount, and is ready to place into an A5 frame. The print size is 14cm x 10cm (5.5" x 4"), and the image size is 11cm x 7,4cm (4.3" x 2.9"). The print will be posted for free and in a card backed envelope.

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Cicely Mary Barker was born in 1895 in Croydon, South London, and spent most of her life there. Due to ill health she was educated at home and taught herself to draw and paint, encouraged by a supportive family and assisted by membership of the Croydon Art Society. She was only sixteen when she had her first work accepted for publication as a set of postcards, and from that time she devoted her career to painting.

It was her Flower Fairies that brought Cicely Mary Barker her greatest popular acclaim. Like the pre-Raphaelite painters whom she so much admired, she believed in recreating the beauty of nature in art and in drawing from real life. Her plants and flowers were observed with complete botanical accuracy and in the fairies themselves, she captured perfectly the unselfconscious grace of children, whom she used to sketch in her sister's school. Cicely once wrote:

"So let me say quite plainly, that I have drawn all the plants and flowers very carefully, from real ones; and everything that I have said about them is as true as I could make it. But I have never seen a fairy; the fairies and all about them are just 'pretend'."

This unique blend of accuracy and fantasy had by then established a popularity for the Flower Fairies books which endures to this day, both for our children and for many of us grown-ups too!