British Illustrators 18: Rudyard Kipling and Just So Stories

Now, don’t misunderstand me, I liked “The Jungle Book” when I read it. The problem was, though, that I’d already seen Disney’s wonderful film version, and this was something altogether different. My favourites of Kipling’s works are a number of his poems, and also his “Just So Stories”. These are stories, concerning how various animals came to be the way that they are, that Kipling made up for his daughter Josephine. The title comes from the fact that Kipling had to tell each tale exactly the same way he had told it previously – just so – or Josephine would complain. Maybe it’s because these stories were so personal to his own family that Kipling decided to illustrate the stories himself. I’ve copied The Elephant’s Child, which may possibly be the best known of the collection. Looking at it you can see that either his Dad taught him a thing or two about art, or he inherited some of his old man’s talent, because there’s not just skill at draughtsmanship here, but also a strong sense of the effect you can get by using large areas of black within a monochrome sketch. I can only surmise that maybe Kipling was just too prolific a writer to have the time to illustrate his own books for the most part, but even if just for his illustrations to the Just So Stories alone he deserves to be considered among the ranks of very fine writer-illustrators.