John Dickson Batten was born in Plymouth, Devon, on 8 October 1860. The son of a QC, Batten studied law at Cambridge’s Trinity College and was invited into the Inner Temple in 1884. Having decided that he had chosen the wrong career, Batten relinquished law and began studying art at the Slade under the tutelage of the seminal French painter, etcher, and sculptor Alphonse Legros. During this time Batten began displaying his work at the Royal Academy (1891-1922), the Grosvenor Gallery, the New Gallery, and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. His beautiful paintings frequently contained mythological and allegorical motifs that would pervade his life’s work and steer his career in a definite direction. Some of Batten’s most notable paintings from this period include: The Garden of Adonis: Amoretta and Time, Sleeping Beauty: The Princess Pricks Her Finger, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and Atalanta and Melanion.
Amongst Batten’s most well known achievements were his contributions to various fairy tale books by Australian folklorist and writer Joseph Jacobs, including English Fairy Tales (1890), More English Fairy Tales (1894), Celtic Fairy Tales (1892), More Celtic Fairy Tales (1894), Indian Fairy Tales (1912), and European Folk and Fairy Tales (1916). These fantastic volumes masterfully illustrated by Batten would see Jacobs become one of the most popular writers of fairy tales in the English language—an achievement still true to this day. Batten’s contributions to these seminal works also earned him a similarly important accolade in the history of illustrated fairy tales.
Batten also illustrated the 1893 edition of the Arabian Nights, the famous collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales dating back to the Islamic Golden Age. The Arabian Nights became the most favoured book of numerous Romantic and Victorian British authors, influencing the likes of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dickens in their childhood and later work. Many other notable illustrators have brought its tales to life over the decades, including Arthur Boyd Houghton, John Tenniel, Jogn Everett Millais, and George John Pinwell, and Edmund Dulac.
By late 1890s Batten had turned his attention to painting with egg tempera. He was a seminal figure in the revival of the technique along with Birmingham artist Arthur Gaskin, serving as the Secretary to the Society of Painters in Tempera for many years. Batten died on the 5 August, 1932.
(source: https://www.pookpress.co.uk/project/john-d-batten-biography/)