Henry Justice Ford and His Pictures of Dragons

Henry Justice Ford (1860-1941) was a prolific illustrator with hundreds of illustrated books for kids under his belt. Especially important were his collaborations with Andrew Lang, editor of numerous books among which so-called colored fairy books took a very special place. These books with Ford's images were sold worldwide with millions of children growing up with pictured scenes from most popular fairy tales as H. J. Ford saw them.

Ford worked mostly in Pre-Raphaelite's style (he was good friend with Burne Jones) which fit great with medieval scenes. Knights, a lot of ladies in trouble, and all kinds of monsters were drawn in pen and ink, sometimes colored later and sometimes (rarely) initially done in oil or watercolor. Originals of such paintings are often worth more than ten thousand dollars.

This page is dedicated to his presentation of dragons. While we immediately associate dragons with the fairy world, there are actually not so many beautiful illustrations of dragons available. Henry Justice Ford drew a pretty good share of them.

Heart of Ice is from The Green Fairy Book (1892):

The Three Dogs is from the same book as well.

Yellow Fairy Book, published in 1894, brought four stories with illustrations of dragons.

The Dragon of the North:

The Dragon and his Grandmother (a version of Grimm's Devil and his Grandmother, KHM 125) has two illustrations:

The Seven Headed Serpent:

The Flower Queen's Daughter:

Pink Fairy Book was first published in 1897 and there's How the Dragon Was Tricked.

How the Red Cross Knight Slew the Dragon is the only colored picture in this page at the moment. It is from The Red Romance Book from 1905.

In 1906 another colored fairy book was published. This time it was called after color orange and presented the story titled The Frog and the Lion Fairy with two illustrations.

Last three illustrations are from The Red Book of Animals where dragons occupy the whole chapter:

We'll add more pictures of dragons by Henry Justice Ford when we find them.