Picture This: Three Bears

In her latest Picture This column, Nicolette Jones takes a look at three picturebooks starring bears.

‘Every illustrator has to do a bear book sometime’, Raymond Briggs said to me once. The three pictures I want to consider here are by artists who did just that. And they made me reflect that illustrations of bears fall into three categories.  They can be based on toys – specifically teddies, or on real animals, or they are caricatures. (Although caricatures may also overlap with either of the other two classifications.)

Examples of the first group include E H Shepard’s depiction of A A Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, which Disney turned into a caricature of a toy. We know that Shepard based his drawings on his own son’s teddy bear, Growler, and not on any plaything belonging to Christopher Robin.  Also in this category, for instance, are Jane Hissey’s Old Bear and Little Bear, soft toys rendered with scrupulous precision, and Rupert the Bear, who, although he appears in a cartoon strip and is dressed like a person, clearly derives from a conventional ted shape, as originally illustrated by Mary Tourtel and later by Alfred Bestall. Other toy-based representations would be, say, the family of teddies in Jill Murphy’s Peace at Last, or Jarvis’s endearing hero in the Bear and Bird early readers.

Raymond Briggs’ own version, in The Bear, was indebted to a real animal: a huge polar bear with long black claws, though his fur suggested infinite softness. Other illustrators who looked at the actual creature include Levi Pinfold, for the cover and inside illustrations of Hannah Gold’s The Last Bear, and, despite the use of textured collage, Eric Carle, who followed the body shape of a real bear in Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See? Peggy Fortnum’s original Paddington made use of observation of the South American spectacled bear; it was RW Alley’s illustrations to later books that turned him into something much more like a toy. And Helen Oxenbury’s final glimpse of the solitary cave-dweller in We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is inspired by nature rather than stuffing.

Those in the third category, caricatures, look as they tend to in animated films: the Yogi Bear school of illustration. Exponents include Steve Small in I’m Sticking With You, making use of the style’s comic potential, or Leo Timmers in Bear’s Lost Glasses, notwithstanding his notably original technique, or Ross Collins, skilfully drawing a cartoon polar bear in There’s a Bear on My Chair.

No doubt readers can think of plenty of other examples of illustrated bears and identify for themselves which of the three types they belong to.

So, let’s look at three bear images that have featured recently as #newillustrationoftheday on Bluesky and Instagram. The first is by Richard Jones from Safe at Last (out from Walker Books on 3 April). It is the story of a boy who has animal friends and worries about them during a storm, going out into the wild weather to check on them, only to come home to find that they have all gathered at his house to make sure he is safe. In this image, half of a spread, the assembled creatures watch the dawn rise together and are seen largely from behind. The use of sweet shop colours, in the sky and particularly in the jewel-bright birds, gives this picture a quality of fairy tale, with a distinct echo of the joyously colourful work of Brian Wildsmith. But the bear and its two cubs anchor the scene in the natural world – which Wildsmith also often made vibrant. This brown bear sits in the posture of a human being; doubtless bears do also sit like this. The scale, the shape, the texture of the fur and the stance of the two little bears all make us understand we’re looking at real animals. This is a bear you want to spot in the wild in Canada, not acquire at Hamley’s. The creature’s face, illuminated by the morning sun, expresses gentleness. The point of this picturebook is to evoke the possibility of affection between children and animals, suggesting not only the magical light of the sunrise but also the magic of a harmonious world.

The second bear picture is by Sara Ogilvie from Gozzle, a new picture book by Julia Donaldson, which was published by Macmillan on 27 March. Ogilvie has to complement the humour and the tenderness of the text, and find the middle ground between the actual tendency of goslings to attach themselves to anything they see when they hatch, and the fact that these are talking creatures in a fictional world, albeit in a natural setting. Ogilvie’s talent is for caricature, often, as here, underpinned by an underlying observation of reality. So this illustration belongs to the tradition of caricature, with a bear that walks and talks and gestures like a person and has large comical eyes. But unlike, say, the Disney version of Winnie-the-Pooh, this parodies a beast, not a teddy.

The setting is evoked in the same way as the principal characters, making use of the observed shapes and appearance of trees and foliage and a log over a stream but with the expected economical reductiveness of a cartoon. The conventions of caricature are also followed consistently in that it is not only the bear and the baby goose that react with exaggerated human emotions but also a frog and a fish who watch the goings on from a rock in the middle of the stream.

Ogilvie has retained a quality of bear-ness in the large shaggy creature, with the snout, the ears, and the claws, but also takes advantage of the possibilities of this genre to engage us with its feelings as if it were one of us.

And my third bear image is by Natalia Shaloshvili, from her picturebook Bear, which is an exploration of the kind of temperament that prefers its own company. It was published by Frances Lincoln on 13 March. Rich and textured layers of pastel create a softness to rival the pelt of Raymond Briggs’s bear but although this image uses some of the techniques of caricature the bear that it represents is a big cuddly toy rather than a living ursine original. Not only because of the way it sits on the bench and clutches a biscuit, a balloon and a book. The big splodge of the nose and the little round eyes and ears in spotted warmers suggest a face that has already been made to snuggle up with, not one you might be afraid of if it entered your tent. It has the right vibe and the right visual language for a book which is a metaphor for our relationship to each other rather than a study of our relationship to other animals. We want this bear to be sympathetic and comforting and funny and not a wild creature we might need to defend ourselves against. The blurry medium, the candyfloss colour, and the anxious expression all serve the creation of a tender and comical effect. This story celebrates not the majesty of bears (as Pinfold did) but their huggableness.

All these three bear images are delightful, but before you set out on your own bear book it is worth considering which of these three paths you wish to go down, like Goldilocks, to find something that is just right.

Nicolette Jones writes about children’s books for the Sunday Times and is the author of The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs (Thames & Hudson); The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth Century Art (Tate Publishing) and Writes of Passage: Words to Read Before You Turn 13 (Nosy Crow).

Books mentioned:

The Bear, Raymond Briggs, Puffin, 9780141374079, £7.99 pbk

Peace at Last, Jill Murphy, Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-1509862597, £7.99 pbk

The Last Bear, Hannah Gold, illus Levi Pinfold, HarperCollins Children’s Books, 978-0008411312, £7.99 pbk

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See?, Eric Carle, Puffin, 978-0141501598, £7.99 pbk

We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Michael Rosen, Helen Oxenbury, Walker Books,

I’m Sticking with You, Smriti Halls, illus Steve Small, Simon and Schuster, 978-1471182815, £6.99 pbk

Bear’s Lost Glasses, Leo Timmers, Gecko Press, 978-1776575947, £12.99 pbk

There’s a Bear on My Chair, Ross Collins, Nosy Crow, 978-0857633941, £6.99 pbk

Safe at Last, Richard Jones, Walker Books, ‎ 978-1406376258, £12.99 hbk

Gozzle, Julia Donaldson, illus Sara Ogilvie, Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-1529076417, £12.99 hbk

Bear, Natalia Shaloshvili, Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 978-1836006565, £7.99 pbk