Original artwork for The Fairy Treasury: "In the middle of the storm somebody knocked at the town gate, and the old king himself went to open it".

1972. Rare original artwork by the artist of Father Christmas and The Snowman Published within Raymond Briggs's The Fairy Tale Treasury (Hamish Hamilton, 1972) on p. 171. This fine drawing illustrates Andersen's story of "The Real Princess" and is dated only a year before Briggs published Father Christmas, which launched his distinctive comic-strip style of illustration. The old king and Father Christmas share remarkable similarities. The Fairy Tale Treasury comprised 32 classic tales which were selected by Virginia Haviland. It was a companion volume to Briggs's The Mother Goose Treasury which won the 1966 Kate Greenaway Medal. After the original hardback appearance in 1972 (also issued in the US by Coward, McCann and Geoghegan), The Fairy Tale Treasury would be published by Puffin in paperback in 1974. On this occasion the Times Literary Supplement described it as a collection "on a... lavish scale". The reviewer stated that "the illustrations are handsome and of great variety". Muriel Rukeyser, reviewing the book in the New York Times, specifically describes the present illustration: "When the old king whose son, you remember, wanted a real princess, goes out to the palace gate in the rain (and the princess is there), he is wearing his galoshes as well as his crown. The royal umbrella has one rib bent back, the milk-bottles have been put out, the cat is hanging around the rain-burnished ashcans because of a past fish, and a sign says 'Please Shut the Gate'". Original drawing (298 x 224 mm) on paper, laid down to production card (398 x 322 mm), ink and watercolour with surface scoring, unsigned, artist's name and address typed on reverse, mounted, framed and glazed (framed size 428 x 342 mm). Fine and unfaded. Times Literary Supplement, 6 December 1974, p. 1384; Muriel Rukeyser, "The Fairy Tale Treasury", New York Times, Book Review, 8 October 1972, p. 8.