"The Young Giant and The Tailor" by George Cruikshank (1792-1878)

[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> George Cruikshank —> Grimms' Tales —> Next]

The Young Giant and The Tailor

George Cruikshank

Etching that "carefully follow[s] the originals drawn by Cruikshank"

17.6 cm high by 12.5 cm wide (6 ⅞ by 4 ⅜ inches)

German Popular Stories (1826), Vol. II.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Vogler's Commentary

The Young Giant and The Tailor. The artist juxtaposes the thumb-sized dwarf with the giant, while contrasting both figures with the dwarf's father behind the plow. Curiously enough, the supposedly normal-sized farmer is not correctly proportioned in relationship to the horses pulling his plow. Thus the illustration contains the kind of distortion frequently found in drawings done by children. This purposeful childlike distortion of size is found today in the works of many illustrators of children's books. [No. 58, p. 138]

Related Material

Other illustrations from this work (1823, 1826)

Bibliography

German Popular Stories. Ed. Edgar Taylor with an Introduction by John Ruskin. London: John Camden Hotten, nd.

Pritchett, V. S. "A Fine Rough English Diamond: [Review of] Graphic Works of George Cruikshank selected with an introduction and notes by Richard A. Vogler. Dover Publications, 168 pp. 279 illustrations, $7.95 (paper)." The New York Review of Books, 12 June 1980, pp. 6-8.

Taylor, Edgar (translator). German Popular Stories Translated from the Kinder Und Haus Marchen, Collected by M. M. Grimm, from Oral Tradition. Vol. One. London: Charles Baldwyn, 1823.

Taylor, Edgar (translator). German Popular Stories Translated from the Kinder Und Haus Marchen, Collected by M. M. Grimm, from Oral Tradition. Vol. Two. London: James Robins, 1826.

Vogler, Richard A. Graphic Works of George Cruikshank. New York: Dover, 1979.

Created 31 October 2026