About this work
A child drifts through an underwater world of extraordinary delicacy — soft aquamarine and jade greens, pearl whites, and the warm flush of young skin — surrounded by the luminous, living creatures of river and sea. Smith's scenes for *The Water-Babies* depict babies encountering gloriously detailed sea and pond life underwater, and her signature approach is everywhere present: figures rendered with warmth and anatomical tenderness, set against backgrounds that dissolve into atmospheric wash. The work beautifully showcases her delightful blend of the hard outlines of Art Nouveau and the softness of watercolor, a combination that gives each plate both graphic clarity and an almost dreamlike buoyancy. The composition draws the eye gently inward, the child's form at rest or in motion becoming the still center of a world teeming with quiet wonder.
In 1916, Smith was employed by Dodd, Mead & Co. to illustrate *The Water-Babies*, a popular novel by Charles Kingsley first published in London in 1863.
The story follows Tom, a chimney sweep, who falls into a river and is transformed into a water-baby, then undergoes a moral journey — a tale combining Christian allegory, a critique of Victorian labor practices, and a defense of Darwin's recently published theory of evolution.
The large, lavish drawings Smith produced as color plates for the book are among her most loved and admired works — a fact she herself seemed to recognize, bequeathing all twelve upon her death in 1935 to the Cabinet of American Illustration at the Library of Congress. No edition of the novel has since been considered more beautiful or imaginative than the 1916 Dodd, Mead publication with Smith's illustrations.
This print belongs in a space that rewards quiet looking — a reading room with good natural light, a child's room curated with intention, or a hallway where something unexpected stops you on the way past. It speaks directly to anyone who grew up with illustrated books and has never quite let go of them, and equally to collectors drawn to the Golden Age of American illustration at its most technically assured. The mood it sets is one of gentle enchantment: not saccharine, but genuinely tender — the feeling of a world where imagination and the natural world are the same thing.
