Original Work

Beauty and the princess was first conceived and created in 1963 through the collaboration of Derek Collard and his Coventry School of Art colleague Eric Elmes. Originally titled “Princess and the Beauty” Derek donated this work to the Herbert museum in 1964 where the original lino prints of this work remain today.

The story

Set in the year of 1896,  Beauty and the Princess is a fictitious story that recounts the adventure of an inquisitive young Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg and her visit to the Royal Academy. Young Lady Battenberg is bothering the royal household with her infatuation of the chrysanthemum and desire to better understand the nature of beauty. Under the guidance of her grandmother Queen Victoria, her trip to speek with lord Leighton proves to be an enchanting adventure.

Digitally remastering the original images

Having Discovered that this collection of work was held in the vaults of the Herbert museum, Dylan and Benjamin Collard collaborated once again to document all that they had found. Utilising Dylan’s many years of photographic expertise, they first made a comprehensive high resolution record of the Herbert museum’s collection.  Benjamin then set about digitally remastering this work. Cleaning, brightening and sharpening the originals to breathe new life to this otherwise forgotten archive.

Rewriting the original text

The decision to rewrite the original story that accompanies Derek Collard’s illustrations was the result of the incomplete, historically inaccurate and illegible nature of the original story. The first obstacle was the lack of any record of Eric Elmes either at Coventry School of Art or within online records of future or previous publishings. In addition to the absence of any record of the author, there was also the problem of several missing pages from the original storyline and with no page numbers on either text or images, the incomplete and unsequenced nature of this original work made it necessary to rewrite this story as a part of its reconstruction.  Lino printed in an often cramped and illegible fashion, the original prints are also littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. However, after piecing together what existed of the original storyline it then became apparent that the storyline included several wildly inaccurate historical references that put characters from different time periods together in the same plot. Despite the obviously fictitious nature of this story, in rewriting and redesigning what exists of the original work, Benjamin Collard has patched together and embellished the original plot. As well as making the text legible and removing the grammatical errors, Benjamin has replaced the original characters so that the whole fictitious story fits within a more cogent historic context.