THE WATER BABIES. A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby.

Early edition. Publisher's original green cloth with titles and decoration in black to the upper board and spine, with colour illustration by Katharine Cameron onlay to the upper board. Illustrated title page and eight full page colour plates by Katharine Cameron. A very good copy, the binding square and firm with some bumping and fraying at the tips of the moderately toned spine, the cloth is lightly rubbed and marked. With a small split in the cloth at the head of the spine joint and a little chip to the top right corner of the pictorial onlay. The contents, have a gift inscription (dated 1921) to the blank reverse of the frontispiece, mild offsetting to the endpapers, some toning to the paper stock, the odd faint corner crease and some spotting throughout.

A beautifully illustrated edition of Charles Kingsley's victorian children's classic. Katharine Cameron (1874-1965), studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1889 to 1893 where she became associated with a small circle of female students who called themselves 'The Immortals'. The group included the sisters Frances and Margaret Macdonald, Janet Aitken, Agnes Raeburn, Jessie Keppie, John Keppie, Herbet McNair, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Her paintings, blending Art Nouveau, Celtic Revival, Arts and Crafts movement, and Japonisme aesthetics lent themselves to book illustration. As a student she contributed illustrations for 'The Yellow Book' and was later contracted by the London publishers T. C. and E. C. Jack to illustrate Fairy Tale gift books. Cameron exhibited widely in a career spanning nearly seven decades. Her first was in 1891 at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, where she exhibited 'September Flowers'. A year later she was elected a member of the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists, and of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1897. Her final solo exhibition took place in 1959 at T&R Annan & Sons, Glasgow.