The Drawings of Mervyn Peake

by Mervyn Peake (Illustrator), Hilary Spurling (Introduction)

For Mervyn Peake, drawing was an essential discipline, a daily effort to subdue the workings of a disorderly and prodigal imagination. The vital authoritative line he so admired in others is the anchor of his work, for even the wildest freaks of his imagination are born of scrupulous observation—as he said, 'The most luxurious tresses are anchored in a bone', for he religiously studied anatomy. Some of the drawings in this collection will be familiar to students of Peake's work, but those in the last section have not been published before. They belong to the period just before his long and ultimately fatal illness, and are peopled with monsters and incubi. In these last drawings he directed his uncompromising stare on the fiends that inhabit the fearful mind; it is the juxtaposition of these with his earlier work, allied to Hilary Spurling's perceptive introduction, which makes this book so representative of this considerable artist.

Genres: Art

128 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English modernist writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books, though the Titus books would be more accurate: the three works that exist were the beginning of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, following his protagonist Titus Groan from cradle to grave, but Peake's untimely death prevented completion of the cycle, which is now commonly but erroneously referred to as a trilogy. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien, but his surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.

Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children ("Letters from a Lost Uncle"), stage and radio plays, and Mr Pye, a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero.

Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he lived in London, and he was commissioned to produce portraits of well-known people. A collection of these drawings is still in the possession of his family. Although he gained little popular success in his lifetime, his work was highly respected by his peers, and his friends included Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene. His works are now included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Imperial War Museum.