Small creatures, beautifully observed. Warmth in every line.
Audrey Tarrant was a London-born illustrator whose career began with greeting cards in 1956 and expanded into children's books a decade later — and whose work, across all of it, maintained the same quietly enchanting quality: anthropomorphic animals rendered with genuine charm and gentle humour, dressed in the fashions of a cosier, slower world. Rabbits at tea. Bears on seesaws. Mice in aprons attending to things that mice probably don't attend to, but absolutely should.
Her illustrations belong to a beloved tradition of British illustrated giftware — alongside the work of Margaret Tarrant, Molly Brett and Margaret Tempest — that has never gone out of fashion, because the warmth in it is not nostalgic decoration but something more essential. These are images that make people feel, quite simply, that the world is a gentle place.
Our Audrey Tarrant collection brings together greeting cards, postcards and gifts featuring her original illustrations — for those who grew up with her work and those discovering it for the first time.
Some things age into something rarer. This is one of them.
