Unseen Tove Jansson Drawings Go on Show in London — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration will stage 'Tove Jansson and her Families' from 21 November to 9 May — the UK's first exhibition dedicated to Jansson's illustrations, with more than 100 exhibits including sketches, photographs, films, and personal correspondence, announced 25 years after her death.
- Sophia Jansson, Tove's niece and chair of the Moomin Characters brand, said previously unseen material has recently surfaced, including an early draft cover sketch for Moominpappa at Sea showing Moominpappa with a giant shell — an image she herself had never seen.
- Tove Jansson began writing and illustrating homemade booklets at age seven, selling them to classmates, and went on to create the Moomin books between 1945 and 1977 — now translated into more than 60 languages with up to 30 million copies sold.
- JRR Tolkien was reportedly surprised by Jansson's illustration of a monstrously large Gollum in her Swedish edition of The Hobbit, and amended the second edition to describe Gollum as 'a small, slimy creature' — the first English edition with Jansson's illustrations is published this month by HarperCollins.
- Jansson's WWII anti-fascist political cartoons included one depicting a woman asking a toy shop for a doll that says 'Momma,' only to be told the new stock says 'Heil Hitler,' per the source.
- Paul Gravett, Jansson expert and guest curator, said her prose novels remain topical because they celebrate eccentricity and tolerance — 'isn't it wonderful how very different we all are?'
- Jansson's first Moomin comic strip series launched in London's Evening News in 1954, making her one of the few female cartoonists with her own daily strip at the time; one rescued early sketch, covered in coffee stains and headed for the waste paper bin, will be displayed.
Why it matters: For UK audiences, this is the first dedicated look at Jansson's illustration practice rather than her Moomin brand — and the exhibition surfaces a little-known literary footnote: Jansson's Tolkien artwork reportedly prompted Tolkien to revise Gollum's canonical size, with the first English edition of her Hobbit illustrations out this month from HarperCollins.
Ask SkimNews
