Serious concerns

It’s funny, isn’t it, how a dust jacket on a book can draw you to it from the other end of a room — always supposing the illustration is by Edward Ardizzone. In fact, is there anything more suggestive of delight than a book illustrated by him? It’s the Midas touch even for unprepossessing authors. The exhibition of his work at the House of Illustration finishes off with a wall lined with them: The Little Grey Men, Jim at the Corner, Italian Peepshow, Johnny’s Bad Day, Eleanor Farjeon’s Book… you’ll recognise lots.

And there’s something utterly distinctive about every one: the boy’s upturned nose, the rounded line of a motherly woman’s bottom — he’s good at soft women’s lines; the tapering narrow shins of two children in Edwardian dress; the curve of a dragonfly’s body over a pool where a dwarf with a wooden leg sits fishing. Just a line, usually a curved line, but evocative of a delicacy and humanity that characterised everything — well, nearly everything — he ever drew.