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Illustration news: the British Library purchases the visual archive of Mervyn Peake

This year the British library has announced a major purchase, the visual archive of the brilliant and idiosyncratic artist, writer, and illustrator Mervyn Peake, which contains over 300 original illustrations, and will now become fully accessible to the public for the first time.

Who was Mervyn Peake?

Best known for the cult Gormenghast series of fantasy novels, Peake was a highly original and inventive artist and writer. He is also regarded as one of the finest children’s illustrators of the twentieth century, and challenged the conventions of the genre by embracing grotesque and eccentric elements in his work to evoke fear and wonder.

Peake was born in 1911 in China, where his father was a missionary doctor. His family remained in China for most of Peake’s early years, before returning permanently to England in 1922, and his memories of Chinese architecture and culture later echoed through his work. After studying at Croydon School of Art, and at the Royal Academy Schools from 1929 to 1933, Peake began to enjoy success in the 1930s as a painter and theatre designer, as well as publishing his first children's books.

When WWII broke out in 1939, Peake applied to become a war artist, but was rejected. He was conscripted into the Royal Artillery, and later the Royal Engineers, and began writing Titus Groan, the first novel in the Gormenghast series, before suffering a nervous breakdown that led to him being discharged in 1942. Artistically, the next five years were amongst the most productive of Peake’s life, as he completed the novels Titus Groan and Gormenghast, and some of the most celebrated illustrations of his career. During this time he also designed the iconic logo of Pan Books, opting, on the advice of Graham Greene, to accept a single payment of £10 for the design, rather than a share of future royalties. In 1945, he was commissioned to visit Germany and record its wartime devastation, including Belsen, which profoundly influenced his later work.

From the middle of the 1950s Peake sadly began to suffer from Parkinson’s disease, as well as a second nervous breakdown in 1957. Nevertheless, with the help of his wife, fellow artist Maeve Gilmore, he continued to work, and in 1959 he published the third novel in the Gormenghast series, Titus Alone. He died in 1968, having spent the final four years of his life in hospital.

Peake’s legacy

Although critically acclaimed during his lifetime (Gormenghast received both the Heinemann Award for Literature and a prize from the Royal Society of Literature), Peake’s novels arguably enjoyed greater success after his death, and have been praised as some of the greatest works of literature of the twentieth century. Translated into more than 20 languages, the series has been adapted for radio (including a production starring Sting as its anti-hero Steerpike), and a lavish BBC miniseries starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Christopher Lee, and Stephen Fry. In August 2019 it was announced that the author Neil Gaiman will be producing a new adaptation of the novels with Showtime.

What does the archive contain?

The archive purchased by the British Library contains some of Peake’s finest original illustrations, including those for the Gormenghast series, and for his children’s books, such as Letters From a Lost Uncle. It also includes the original drawings for his illustrations of classic books such as Treasure Island and Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, as well as portraits of well-known writers, artists and theatrical figures including Laurence Olivier, W H Auden and Peggy Ashcroft.

What will happen to the archive?

The archive (which was purchased from the Peake family for £500,000) will now be catalogued, before being made available to researchers and to the public in British Library exhibitions. It also joins Peake’s literary archive, which was purchased by the Library in 2010, offering a full insight into the work of a creative for whom writing and illustration were inextricably linked.

Thank you for reading,
Rebecca Wall & Cluster Team.