Tove Jansson London Exhibition Shows Unseen Moomin Drawings — SkimNews
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- The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration will host "Tove Jansson and her Families" from 21 November to 9 May in Clerkenwell — the UK's first exhibition dedicated to Jansson's illustrations, staged 25 years after her death.
- Sophia Jansson, Tove's niece and creative director of the Moomins Characters brand, said the more than 100 exhibits — which include sketches, photographs, films, and personal correspondence — feature material she herself had not previously seen.
- A previously unseen sketch of Moominpappa with a giant shell, an early draft for the cover of Moominpappa at Sea, will go on display alongside original art from Jansson's 1945 debut, The Moomins and the Great Flood.
- Jansson's illustrations for The Hobbit portrayed Gollum as "monstrously large," prompting JRR Tolkien to amend his second edition to describe the character as "a small, slimy creature"; the first English edition with her artwork publishes this month via HarperCollins.
- Guest curator Paul Gravett noted Jansson was writing and illustrating homemade booklets by age seven, selling them to classmates, and traced her lifelong fascination with fantasy to childhood reading.
- Jansson's Moomin comic strip debuted in London's Evening News in 1954 — one of the first daily strips by a female cartoonist — and one surviving early sketch was rescued from a waste paper bin by a fellow cartoonist.
Why it matters: For UK fans of Jansson's Moomin books — which have sold up to 30m copies across 60+ languages — this is the first UK exhibition dedicated to her illustration work, running 21 November to 9 May. The Tolkien crossover, where her oversized Gollum forced JRR Tolkien to revise his text, gives the show appeal well beyond children's-literature devotees.
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