34 Facts About Charles Keeping

Charles William James Keeping was an English illustrator, children's book author and lithographer.

Charles Keeping made the illustrations for Rosemary Sutcliff's historical novels for children, and he created more than twenty picture books.

Charles Keeping illustrated the complete works of Charles Dickens for the Folio Society.

Charles Keeping illustrated The God Beneath the Sea, by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen, which won the 1970 Carnegie Medal for children's literature.

Charles Keeping's lithographs have been exhibited in London, Italy, Austria and the US, including at the 1958 Fifth International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography in Cincinnati.

Charles Keeping has prints in many collections, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Charles Keeping was born and grew up in Lambeth, London, in a terraced house that housed three generations.

Charles Keeping lived in an inner city environment of street markets and working horses that would inform his work his entire life.

Charles Keeping later described his upbringing as "comfortable working class".

Charles Keeping attended the Frank Bryant School for Boys in Kennington, North London, leaving at the minimum age of 14, after which two of his aunts paid for him to take a correspondence course in art.

Charles Keeping returned to civilian life in 1946 with a profound depression and a belief that a head wound he had sustained had disfigured him on the inside as well as on the outside, and would cause him to turn evil like Dr Jekyll becoming Mr Hyde.

Charles Keeping received treatment, was institutionalised for a time, and made a full recovery, but perhaps his sympathetic visual treatment of Grendel, the monster from Beowulf, owes something to this period of his life.

Charles Keeping applied for a grant to study art at the Regent Street Polytechnic, but was initially turned down, so he read meters for a gas company during the day and took art classes in the evening.

Charles Keeping finally got his grant and studied full-time from 1949 to 1952, completing the two-year Intermediate Examination in six months before specialising in illustration and lithography.

Charles Keeping's teachers included illustrators Stuart Tresilian and Nigel Lambourne, and lithographer Henry Trivick.

Charles Keeping worked as a life model, and on one such occasion in 1949 his demonstration of the functions of the muscles of the back attracted the eye of Renate Meyer, a fellow student who had left Germany with her family in 1933.

Charles Keeping went freelance after graduation, and spent four years drawing a comic strip for the Daily Herald, but did not enjoy the editorial restrictions he had to work under.

Charles Keeping did some work in advertising, and illustrated some educational textbooks.

Charles Keeping was unenthused by the ancient Roman subject matter, but experimented with double page spreads and drawings in the margins, and was quickly assigned more books by Sutcliff and others, including Henry Treece.

Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen's retelling of Greek myths, The God Beneath the Sea, which Charles Keeping illustrated in 1970, won the Carnegie Medal for that year.

Charles Keeping followed these with Charley, Charlotte and the Golden Canary, a modern fairy tale about two children who grow up in the same street, are separated when one family moves to a new tower block, and are reunited thanks to a pet canary, which depicts the gradual disappearance of the London of Keeping's childhood, a theme he would persistently revisit.

Charles Keeping created 15 full-colour picture books for Oxford University Press, and several for other publishers.

Charles Keeping continued to produce colour picture books from time to time, including Railway Passage, which was Highly Commended for the 1974 Greenaway Medal; Sammy Streetsinger, about a subway busker's rise to fame as a pop star and subsequent return to happy obscurity; and his final book, Adam and Paradise Island, another story of the changing landscape of London, which was published posthumously in 1989.

In 1964 Charles Keeping illustrated his first book for the Folio Society, an edition of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

Charles Keeping disliked the book, finding the characters unconvincing, and so illustrated them in two-colour lithographs in an expressionist style, paying little attention to the faces.

Charles Keeping had been contracted for twelve illustrations, but delivered twenty-two, and asked the publisher to choose the twelve best.

Charles Keeping followed this with Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front in a similar style.

Charles Keeping worked for another publisher of classic fiction, the Geneva-based Heron Books, for whom he illustrated works by Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Aldous Huxley, W Somerset Maugham, Nevil Shute, Robert Louis Stevenson and H G Wells.

In 1975 Charles Keeping produced perhaps his most personal work, Cockney Ding Dong, a lavish 190-page volume collecting and illustrating the traditional songs of the family singalongs of his childhood.

At the invitation of Henry Trivick, Charles Keeping continued to use the printing presses at Regent Street Polytechnic after his graduation, and from 1956 to 1963 he lectured there one day a week.

Charles Keeping died of a brain tumour on 16 May 1988.

Charles Keeping was one of three runners-up for the illustration award in 1974 and was the British nominee again in 1978.

Charles Keeping won a Golden Apple award at the Biennial of Illustration Bratislava in 1975.

Charles Keeping was a runner-up for at least three Greenaway Medals, which then recognised the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject:.