The six framed art works by Walter Crane grace
a corridor on the ground floor of St. Grimbald’s Court.
The North Wind and the Robin appeared in the 1878 “The Baby’s Bouquet” which was a companion to the “Baby’s Opera”, a book of English nursery songs planned in 1877 with Edmund Evans.
About the artist:
Crane was hired in 1893-1896 as a part-time as Director of Design at the Manchester School of Art, and became director of the Royal College of Art from 1897 to 1898. His status as an artist as well as a teacher helped develop and promote the Arts and Crafts movement.
In 1907 he published his autobiography called An Artist’s Reminiscences. It was an attempt at an explanation of why he spent a lot of his life fighting for socialism: “Such experiences convinced me that freedom in any country is measured by the impunity with which unpopular opinions can be uttered – especially those advocating drastic political or social changes – or by the length of the tether of toleration, and that certain public rights may be won, but that they require constant vigilance to defend and maintain. It was a stormy period, and the bourgeois were in panic, and the wildest ideas of Socialism were about. We were mis-represented and abused in every direction, and confused with the advocates of the use of dynamite.”
High quality images came from Paul Webb’s blog. It can be found here.