Fairies in the forget-me-nots. Angels in the apple blossom. A world where the boundary between the natural and the enchanted is exactly as thin as a child always suspected it was.
Margaret Tarrant was one of the most gifted and most beloved illustrators of the early twentieth century — a British artist whose watercolour work, produced primarily between the 1900s and the 1950s, captured the particular magic of childhood imagination with a tenderness and a technical skill that made her prints among the most widely reproduced in the gift trade for decades. Her fairies inhabit flowers and dewdrops and autumn leaves with the complete conviction of someone who found the natural world not merely beautiful but genuinely inhabited by something beyond the visible. Her religious illustrations — angels, nativity scenes, the Christmas imagery that made her name in the greeting card world — carry the same quality: warm, precise, suffused with a light that feels considered rather than accidental.
Tarrant worked at the intersection of the Arts and Crafts movement and the golden age of British children's book illustration — the same tradition as Arthur Rackham, Cicely Mary Barker and her contemporary Mabel Lucie Attwell — and her best work shares with those artists the conviction that illustration for children should be made with the same care and the same ambition as any serious fine art. The children who grew up with her prints on their walls carried them into adulthood and passed the affection on. The prints have not dated. They never quite will.
Our Margaret Tarrant collection brings together gifts, homeware and accessories featuring her beloved illustrations — for devoted collectors, for lovers of vintage British illustration and the particular aesthetic of early twentieth century fairy art, and for anyone who has always felt that the garden, properly attended to, contains considerably more than it appears to.
Look closely at the foxgloves. She always put something there.
