Silhouettes by Jane Elizabeth Cook

These exquisite silhouette illustrations produced by Jane Elizabeth Cook are on display at the Vale and Downland Museum, Wantage. They are amazingly delicately detailed and full of life and movement and reminded me of the work of Jan Pienkowski. Each one illustrates a nursery rhyme yet includes tiny narratives of its own. Even washing drying on a line is made to look interesting and poetic. Jane Cook was a successful artist and portrait painter when she married Henry Cook in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1868 the family moved to Wantage when Henry became headmaster of King Alfred’s Grammar School. Jane helped her husband build up the school and although she gave up her painting career she produced silhouettes of nursery rhyme characters for her children. The Autotype Company, also based in Wantage, produced several volumes of her silhouette illustrations of nursery rhymes and verse. On display in the Museum are one of these books and two pages of illustrations, which were recently acquired in an auction in the Netherlands; it’s good to see them back where they originated.