Quentin Blake has pledged his entire collection to the House of Illustration. This includes finished illustrations to over 250 books, as well as freelance commissions for magazines and posters over the past 60 years.
To give you a taster of some of the works that will be in the House of Illustration’s collection, here is a small exhibition of birds by Quentin Blake. Birds have featured in much of Quentin Blake’s work, whether illustrating stories by other writers such as ‘Up with Birds!’ (1998), ‘The Heron and the Crane’ (1999) and ‘Featherbrains’ (1993) (all by John Yeoman); or showing them in his own work, as in ‘Cockatoos’ (1992) or ‘The Life of Birds’ (2005).
"I have been interested in birds since I was at school. The only autograph I collected as a schoolboy was of Eric Hosking, the best-known bird photographer of that time. I may have got as much out of his books - ‘Birds of the Day’, ‘Birds of the Night’, and so on - as out of the real thing, as I was a rather ineffectual bird-watcher. I can't really describe what the fascination is, though it's obviously one that is shared by thousands of others, and I still have an eye for the herons and egrets of South West France, not to mention the occasional avocet or black-winged stilt.
When I draw birds, however, it is not so much the characteristics of a species that takes me as much as general birdness - stance, poise, gait and glance. When, thirty-five years ago, I was invited to illustrate a book for the Lion and Unicorn Press of the Royal College of Art, I chose ‘The Birds of Aristophanes’ which proffered the rich idea of birds as people, people as birds."
Quentin Blake, from the catalogue for ‘Quentin Blake at Christmas’, Dulwich Picture Gallery, October 2004 to January 2005
