Water Baby Rides a Fish, for Charles Kingsley's "The Water-Babies"

Jessie Wilcox Smith

1916 · Pen and ink and watercolor · Drawings and Prints

In 1916 the leading American illustrator Jessie Wilcox Smith was employed by Dodd, Mead & Co. to illustrate "The Water-Babies," a popular novel by Charles Kingsley first published in London in 1863. This drawing of a child riding a large fish became a black and white line image on the half-title page of the related volume, the first that the reader encounters in the book. The story tells how a chimney sweep, Tom falls into a river and is transformed into a water-baby who then undergoes a moral journey (a tale that combines Christian allegory, a critique of Victorian labor practices and defends Darwin's recently published theory of evolution).

Artist

Jessie Wilcox Smith

Date

1916

Medium

Pen and ink and watercolor

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Gift of Jacqueline Loewe Fowler, 2020