Mabel Lucie Attwell was a British illustrator and comics artist. She was known for her cute, nostalgic drawings of children, based on her daughter, Peggy. Her drawings are featured on many postcards, advertisements, posters, books and figurines.
Attwell's initial career was founded on magazine illustration, which she continued throughout her life, but around 1900 she began receiving commissions for book illustration, notably for W & R Chambers and the Raphael House Library of Gift Books. Her early works were somewhat derivative of the style of artists such as her friend Hilda Cowham, Jessie Willcox Smith, John Hassall, and the Heath Robinson brothers. From 1914 onwards, she developed her trademark style of sentimentalised rotund cuddly infants, which became ubiquitous across a wide range of markets.
In 1908, she married painter and illustrator Harold Cecil Earnshaw and became the mother of one daughter and two sons.
She illustrated children's classics such as Mother Goose (1910), Alice in Wonderland (1911), Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1914), The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley (1915), and an edition of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy abridged and written by May Byron (1921). For the gift books published by Messrs Raphael Tuck (Mother Goose, Alice in Wonderland, and later volumes including Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (1913) and Grimm's Fairy Tales (1925)), she provided line drawings as well as "colour work for twelve full-page half-tone plates."
Attwell's illustrations caught the attention of Queen Marie of Romania, who wrote children's books and short stories in English. Attwell was invited to spend several weeks at the royal palace in Bucharest in 1922. She also illustrated two long stories of the queen's, which were published by Hodder and Stoughton.
In 1926 Shelley Potteries commissioned Attwell to produce designs for children's china ware, following the successful sales of china decorated with designs by Hilda Cowham.
(source: wikipedia)