The House that Jack Built

This was the second of Randolph Caldecott's Picture Books, published together with "John Gilpin" in 1878.  

The "House" depicted in this book still (at 2004) stands, and is in Hanmer, England.

This is the cat ...

Randolph went to great lengths to depict animals accurately.  He had been taught to sculpt by the French sculptor Jules Dalou; he obtained a skeleton of a cat, to help him to understand its bone structure; and as well as drawing the cat which appears on page 9 of this book (illustrated here), he produced a matching life-size sculpture of it.  This sculpture is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England (but sadly at the time of writing, 2/2004, it is not on public display and can be viewed only by special prior arrangement).

Randolph's original illustration, from which the engraver produced printing blocks, would have been a mirror image of the printed result shown here.  This is why the sculpted version (below), which would have matched Randolph's picture, is also a mirror image of the printed version.

(Photographed by our Webwallah, during a visit by R C Soc members to see the V&A's Caldecott sculptures, Dec 2003.  Reproduced by kind permission of the V&A.)

 
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