Liberty 737pc Map of British Empire 1886 Walter Crane1
I finally got around to ordering this image as a Grafika 2000pc cardboard jigsaw from what used to be 'Rue de Puzzles' but is now jigsawpuzzlesuk. They are limiting orders to £130 and a certain weight to UK customers because of Brexit issues.
However, Liberty are still not opening their website to supply international orders - in spite of a reply on their website more than 3 months ago, when they closed their domestic queueing system saying they were working towards this. Liberty have been off limits to us for more than 18 months! I think they can now forget about Christmas 2021 orders from outside of the USA. Shame on them!
This jigsaw Grafika was my top cardboard contender for the theme of History.
Sept 2020
This is for Maria, who badly wants to be able to order this jigsaw from Liberty Puzzles, whose production is under such pressure from buyers that they have introduced a queueing system, and aren't shipping overseas.
I saw this jigsaw for sale in May 2020, noted that it was large for Liberty and that it was by a favourite Arts & Craft artist Walter Crane. I've seen the exhibition poster at art exhibitions (possibly the William Morris Gallery where we go quite often, or at the Tate) and it is a lovely thing. I bid on it but it wasn't on my wish list (which I now regret) and I thought it would go too high.
You can read a great article about the map and Walter Crane at the Victorian Web:
www.victorianweb.org/art/design/crane/1.html
"Imperial Federation: Map Showing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886. Colour lithograph. Published by Maclure & Co. as a supplement to The Graphic, 24 July 1886. This remarkable map was published to mark the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886, and to serve as a kind of souvenir for the event. For visitors to an exhibition at Tate Britain, where the map is on display at the time of writing, Felix Driver explains that it uses a Mercator projection, and is centred on Greenwich, as other British maps of that time would have been, thus "presenting Britain at the centre of the world" with "the parts of the Empire under British rule ... in pink or red which would have been quite conventional at that time." He adds that it shows "economic flows and infrastructure and communications on the one hand, very factual data and little tables, but on the other hand ... this great explosion of peoples from across the Empire as though they are bringing tribute to Britannia." The figures in the margins therefore represent the peoples of these lands, sometimes familiar from Crane's other illustrative work, as "being part of the British family of nations.""
The article goes on to discuss Crane's subversive touches in the illustrations, reflecting his views on the dignity of labour and membership of the Socialist/Communist Pre-Raphaelite circles around Willim Morris and reports his views of a trip to India some 20 years after he did the illustration.
I have visited the India Office buildings during a London Open Weekend event a few years back and had a jigsaw made of one of the fabulous ceilings there. It is a marvellous building, full of rich and fabulously crafted decor and items, like the fabulous flooring.
Liberty 737pc Map of British Empire 1886 Walter Crane1
I finally got around to ordering this image as a Grafika 2000pc cardboard jigsaw from what used to be 'Rue de Puzzles' but is now jigsawpuzzlesuk. They are limiting orders to £130 and a certain weight to UK customers because of Brexit issues.
However, Liberty are still not opening their website to supply international orders - in spite of a reply on their website more than 3 months ago, when they closed their domestic queueing system saying they were working towards this. Liberty have been off limits to us for more than 18 months! I think they can now forget about Christmas 2021 orders from outside of the USA. Shame on them!
This jigsaw Grafika was my top cardboard contender for the theme of History.
Sept 2020
This is for Maria, who badly wants to be able to order this jigsaw from Liberty Puzzles, whose production is under such pressure from buyers that they have introduced a queueing system, and aren't shipping overseas.
I saw this jigsaw for sale in May 2020, noted that it was large for Liberty and that it was by a favourite Arts & Craft artist Walter Crane. I've seen the exhibition poster at art exhibitions (possibly the William Morris Gallery where we go quite often, or at the Tate) and it is a lovely thing. I bid on it but it wasn't on my wish list (which I now regret) and I thought it would go too high.
You can read a great article about the map and Walter Crane at the Victorian Web:
www.victorianweb.org/art/design/crane/1.html
"Imperial Federation: Map Showing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886. Colour lithograph. Published by Maclure & Co. as a supplement to The Graphic, 24 July 1886. This remarkable map was published to mark the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886, and to serve as a kind of souvenir for the event. For visitors to an exhibition at Tate Britain, where the map is on display at the time of writing, Felix Driver explains that it uses a Mercator projection, and is centred on Greenwich, as other British maps of that time would have been, thus "presenting Britain at the centre of the world" with "the parts of the Empire under British rule ... in pink or red which would have been quite conventional at that time." He adds that it shows "economic flows and infrastructure and communications on the one hand, very factual data and little tables, but on the other hand ... this great explosion of peoples from across the Empire as though they are bringing tribute to Britannia." The figures in the margins therefore represent the peoples of these lands, sometimes familiar from Crane's other illustrative work, as "being part of the British family of nations.""
The article goes on to discuss Crane's subversive touches in the illustrations, reflecting his views on the dignity of labour and membership of the Socialist/Communist Pre-Raphaelite circles around Willim Morris and reports his views of a trip to India some 20 years after he did the illustration.
I have visited the India Office buildings during a London Open Weekend event a few years back and had a jigsaw made of one of the fabulous ceilings there. It is a marvellous building, full of rich and fabulously crafted decor and items, like the fabulous flooring.