Francis Rose is a rose is a rose : Gertrude Stein’s The World is Round and its illustrators

International audienceThe multi-faceted relationship of Gertrude Stein to painters, from her tumultuous friendship with Matisse, Picasso and others, which she recalls in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, to her prominent art collection, which was recently exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris, and her many texts on painting, has been the object of numerous critical and scholarly studies, and has contributed in making of Stein, a well-known but little read author, an embodiment of the fanciful patron of the arts in popular representations.It is however a lesser-known fact that Stein also collaborated with artists, and in particular with Sir Francis Rose, to illustrate her books for children. Stein had been a fervent supporter of Rose, a British painter, since the early 1930s. Rose never achieved the fame that she thought he deserved, and paradoxically, he remains known today mostly for his illustration work for Stein, who had wanted to make of him a great painter and even her new Picasso. Stein’s first attempt at writing for children, The World is Round (1938), was commissioned by the American publisher William Scott. Scott refused the drawings by Francis Rose that Stein submitted to him, and had Clement Hurd illustrate the book instead; yet Stein was successful in having Roses’s drawings printed in the British edition of The World is Round. Clement Hurd later became a famous illustrator of children’s books (notably thanks to the successful The Runaway Bunny), and his pictures for Stein’s work do correspond to the demands of children literature: they display sweet animals in blue and pink and round-faced kids in soft lines. Hurd’s approach is inventive and highly interesting in itself, but there is nothing scary to it. Francis Rose’s drawings, on the contrary, are much closer to William Blake’s (also in their way of framing the text rather than being a simple addition to it) than to Walt Disney’s, and as such they are much closer to the uncanny atmosphere emanating from the text.Barbara Will, in one of the only scholarly studies of Stein’s children’s books, suggested that these were closely connected to her war writings, both chronologically and thematically. They are indeed very dark, full of dangerous or morbid situations, and in a much more explicit fashion than many fairy tales. By picturing older, more sexualized children, Francis Rose also points to the problem of marketing The World is Round as children literature; in that sense William Scott’s refusal to publish his illustrations can be understood as the desire to eschew an obvious ambiguity in terms of Stein’s targeted audience.The collaboration between Stein and Rose, then, questions both the role of Stein, as patron, in Rose (a frustrated painter) becoming an illustrator; and the ambiguous desired readership for the book -- children or adults -- an ambiguity which is made explicit by the visual translation of a deeply ambivalent text