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
12. Detail from the illustration by Walter Crane of the rhyme ‘A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go’, The Baby’s Opera, 1877, retrieved from: https://archive.org/stream/babysoperabookof00crantlpage/24/mode/2up. sign also appears on the Zsolnay pattern sheet; several colour variations of this can be found in the collection of the Zsolnay Museum in Pécs.43 The source for the pig’s form is Crane’s illustration to the story ‘There was a Lady Loved a Swine’, which also appears in The Baby’s Opera. The Minton Company’s willingness to execute story illustration designs is evidenced by the numerous Minton tiles depicting La Fontaine’s fables in the Victoria & Albert Museum.44 The collaboration between Walter Crane and Zsolnay is verified not only by the artist’s visit to Pécs in October 1900 but also by the vase design he made for the company.45 Proof of the popularity of the frog wishing to marry is that Walter Crane, known for his strict Greek lines even in his fable illustrations, also snuck a scene into his illustrations for a different tale, ‘The Frog Prince’ (Fig. 14), revealing his subtle humour. Here, we see a depiction of the frog feasting at the royal table in return for retrieving the princess’s golden ball, and below it, on the table cloth, the adventures of the wooing frog, the rat and the mouse are brought to life. This attention to details appears in other illustrations by Crane, such as the background of a scene from Beauty and the Beast, in which the tale of Orpheus taming the wild animals with song is ‘hidden’. The story ‘The Frog He Would A- Wooing Go’ is found at letter F of Crane’s alphabet book (The Absurd ASC).46 Although the above overview of the museum’s objects and their analogies is not complete, it clearly shows that fables were used to decorate objects intended typically for adults (with the exception of storybooks made expressly for children from the late 19th century onwards), just as early editions of La Fontaine’s fables or masterpieces inspired by them were not necessarily for children. One of the reasons for this was that in 13. Detail from a Zsolnay pattern sheet, Janus Pannonius Museum, Pécs, Zsolnay Museum, inv. no. 61.444.46 50
