Flower Fairies of the Wayside

Illustrator Cicely Mary Barker was born in Croydon, England in 1895. As a child she spent much of her time drawing and painting, and her father enrolled her in art courses at the age of 13. She sold her first work two years later to a stationery printer. Barker was elected a life member of Croydon Art Society a year after that. She is most famous for her Flower Fairy series of books and was greatly influenced artistically by Kate Greenaway and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Barker used real-life models for her paintings, created only botanically accurate flowers, and worked primarily in watercolor with pen and ink.