Art of Narrative: The Golden Staircase

These illustrations come from an impressive book published in 1906, titled The Golden Staircase: Poems and Verses for Children (G. P. Putnam's Sons), selected by Louey Chisholm, and illustrated by Minnie Dibdin Spooner. There are sixteen illustrations, including the frontispiece, plus the wonderful book cover itself.

I spent approximately eight hours over the course of four or five days copying and working with the images and posting them at my tumblr blog, The Art of Narrative. Work included straightening, cropping, adjusting the color and contrast, resizing the images, and identifying the poem each image illustrates through the volume's index.

Here's a link to the illustrations at my tumblr, The Art of Narrative.

Here's a link to the source of the illustrations at the Internet Archive, where you can read the poems and view the images in their original context.

I could not find a lot of information on Minnie Dibdin Davison Spooner (1867-1949), other than the fact she was a painter, a sculptor, and a designer. This article on her husband, Charles Spooner, a Scottish architect and designer, will give you some background about her.

There is also a brief article on Minnie Dibdin Spooner here, that adds to the information about her credentials, and the work she did with her husband designing, furnishing, and decorating churches.

Click on each image for greater detail.