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

numerous periods of history, people found references in the moralizing tales to the actual circumstances of the era.47 At the same time, we cannot overlook the often purely decorative use of scenes from fables (especially in the field of applied arts). The irony

was that during this developing period of art for children, which was slowly acquiring prestige in its own right, neither Caldecott nor Crane, a devotee of both this and graph- ic/book art, ever hoped to achieve success in children’s book illustration.48

14. Detail from an illustration by Walter Crane from The Frog Prince, London, Routledge and Sons, 1874, retrieved from: http://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/frogprinceOOcrana.

Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries

51