Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 31. (Budapest, 2017)

Zsuzsa MARGITTAL: La Fontaine’s Fables and Other Animal Tales in the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts’ Collection

10. Visiting Miss Mousey. Illustration by Randolph Caldecott of the rhyme ‘A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go’, The Hey Diddle Diddle Picture Book, London, George Routledge, s. a., Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest, inv. no. 1749

handkerchiefs. The scenes are not exact copies of the depictions of ‘A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go’: The details of the background are less finely rendered (or more carefully if the source was one of the book’s more modest, black and white pictures)39 and the positions of the figures have been altered. Nevertheless, Caldecott’s depictions are still without question the prototypes. Here it is important to note that in 1883, Caldecott made illustrations for Aesop’s fables too.40

The story of the unfortunate frog who goes a-wooing has been around for a long time and appears in several textual variations or as a song; in Caldecott’s circle, Walter Crane also made illustrations of the tale with engravings by Edmund Evans for the 1877 book The Baby’s Opera. We can marvel at the jovial group of characters appearing in the border illustration of this tragicomic story, while at the beginning of the text, we see the frog bridegroom on a lizard’s back as he hastens to his bride (Fig. 12).

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