Tree-Men : Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

Arthur Rackham was the most influential illustrator of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, when fantasy was born and developed in England. The visual style characteristic of this period, at the turn of the 20th century, between the Pre-Raphaelites and Art Nouveau, remains very present in the contemporary imagination. These tree-men from a little-known work by James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), look nevertheless immediately familiar to us. Even if they are more comical than courageous, they obviously carry the seeds of famous fantasy creatures such as the sylvan elves of Warhammer or Tolkien's Ents