Lancelot Speed

Lancelot Speed (1860-1931) was a popular British artist and illustrator. After graduating from Clare College, Cambridge, with a degree in Natural Science, he started contributing to magazines and illustrating books by various writers. Perhaps his most fortuitous association, though, was with Andrew Lang, for whose widely read “Fairy Books” he provided illustrations. It is for those works that Speed is best known today.

Over the course of his long and successful career, Speed illustrated numerous other books that spanned topics from historical and adventure stories and such classics as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels to tales of fantasy and legend. He also collaborated with his wife on a children’s fantasy about “Prince Kebole the Tall.” In his later years, Speed continued to illustrate books and magazines, but he also brought his talents to a new medium: silent film. After the outbreak of World War One, he produced several cartoon films about the “Bully Boy” (Kaiser Wilhelm) and served as a production designer on a film version of H. Rider Haggard’s She. Several series of his animated cartoons followed, including more than twenty shorts about The Wonderful Adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfred.

“The giant sat at supper, gnawing on the limb of a man, and baking his huge frame by the fire.”

“Waving her hands and muttering the charm, and presently enclosed him fast within the tree.”

“'This girdle, lords,’ said she, ‘is made for the most part of mine own hair, which, while I was yet in the world, I loved full well.’”

“Then was Sir Lancelot sent for, and the letter [of Elaine of Astolat] read aloud by the clerk.”

Of most interest to Arthurians are the twenty color and black-and-white illustrations that he created in 1912 for a new edition of Sir James Thomas Knowles’ The Story of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. (Four of the color illustrations are displayed here.) Speed’s images also appeared in a later volume, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (Philadelphia, 1919), edited by Rupert S. Holland, which featured all but one of the original illustrations (“The Giant of St. Michael’s Mount,” which is displayed here). Speed’s elaborate medievalism, love of color, and keen eye for detail combine to evoke a sense of the romance of the Arthurian stories.