Bellerophon: The Chimera - Walter Crane

A print of Walter Crane's Bellerophon Fighting the Chimera — one of the plates Crane produced for Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, retold in the definitive 1892 Houghton Mifflin edition. The winged hero Pegasus rears beneath his rider, while Bellerophon drives his spear down into the triple-bodied beast — lion in front, goat rising from its back, serpent for a tail.

Walter Crane (1845–1915) was one of the defining illustrators of the late Victorian era, a central figure in the Arts & Crafts movement alongside William Morris, and a committed socialist who carried a distinctive graphic style — heavy black line, flat decorative colour, classical composition — into children's books, wallpaper, textiles and political posters. His Hawthorne illustrations are among the most widely reproduced images of Greek myth in the English-speaking world.

This plate brings Crane's decorative instincts into direct contact with his grasp of classical design: the Chimera is treated as heraldic emblem, the Pegasus almost a rocking-horse silhouette, the composition closed in a neat rectangle. Other Bellerophon plates in this series: Riding Pegasus and The Fountain.