Florence Susan Harrison was born aboard the clipper, Windsor Castle, in Moreton Bay, Colony of Queensland (now Australia), on 2 Novemberr 1877 and immigrated to England as an infant when her father's ship sailed back to London in December 1877. Althoughher formal training is not recorded, Her illustrations in childrens' books combine Pre-Raphaelite influences with Art Nouveau design, pairing richly coloured watercolour plates within strong black outlines with decorative pen and ink drawings. Florence Susan Harrison died in Hove, Sussex, on 5 January 1955.
Illustrator and children's poet Florence Susan Harrison was born on 2 November 1877 aboard the clipper ship Windsor Castle, then moored in Moreton Bay at the mouth of the Brisbane River in the British Colony of Queensland (now Australia). She was the second daughter of Norwood Harrison, a master mariner and captain of the vessel, and his wife Lucy Susan (née Thomas). The ship sailed for London on 8 December 1877, and the infant Harrison came to England with her family. By 1901 she was living with her mother and younger brothers, Arthur and Godfrey, in Leyton, Essex.
Harrison first came to public notice in May 1901, when her design for an embroidered firescreen panel was highly commended in a competition run by The Studio. From 1905 she wrote and illustrated books of verse for children for Blackie and Son of Glasgow, beginning with Rhymes and Reasons (1905) and The Rhyme of a Run (1907). For In the Fairy Ring (1908) she received £100, and The Pall Mall Gazette judged that its drawings earned her 'a very high place among the illustrators of children's books' (Jacobs, 2006, online source). In 1908 Blackie commissioned her to illustrate Poems by Christina Rossetti (1910) for its Fine Art Series, and she delivered 36 colour plates in place of the 24 specified. Its success led to Tennyson's Guinevere and Other Poems (1912) and The Early Poems of William Morris (1913), while her own Elfin Song was chosen as Blackie's gift book of the season in 1912.
Her work combines Pre-Raphaelite influences with Art Nouveau design and the bold contours of fin-de-siècle poster art. Her colour plates, built up in layered washes within strong black outlines, have been compared to stained glass, and her line drawings to those of Jessie M. King, sharing what Alan and Barbara Tepa Lupack describe as 'strong decorative elements' (Lupack and Lupack, 2023-24, online source). Recurring motifs include apples, rooks, roses, storm lanterns and fairies with wing markings resembling those of the peacock butterfly. Blackie later reissued her verse in Tales in Rhyme and Colour (1916), a variant of The Rhyme of a Run, and divided In the Fairy Ring into The Pixy Book and The Man in the Moon (both 1918).
Blackie's ledgers show that Harrison worked from Bruges, Belgium, from 1908 to 1914 and again from 1918 to 1920. Flemish gargoyles, canals and townscapes recur in her work, from Elfin Song to Mrs Strang's Annual for Children (1922). In Belgium she befriended the writer Enid Maud Dinnis, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman and a convert to Roman Catholicism, and Harrison later converted as well. Blackie commissioned no new work from her after the mid-1920s, but from 1922 she illustrated children's annuals for Oxford University Press, which sustained her through the Depression. She lived in Putney, London, from 1922 and in 1928-29 worked from a studio in Redcliffe Road, South Kensington. From 1927 she illustrated Dinnis's books and, from 1937 to 1943, her stories for The Sign, an American Catholic monthly, that required pen and ink. Much of her later work is in black and white and includes wartime scenes of evacuees and bomb damage in London. During the Second World War she moved to Hove, Sussex, as companion and carer to her cousin Mary Isobel Harrison, remaining in their rented flat after Mary's death in 1943.
For decades Harrison's work was attributed to Emma Florence Harrison (born Redditch, Worcestershire, 1858), a painter who exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts between 1887 and 1891. The error persisted in standard reference works and in the catalogue of The Last Romantics at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (1989), an exhibition that appears to have included her book illustrations. Her identity was established in the late 2000s by the collector Mary Rosalind Jacobs, working with Harrison's great-niece in Sydney, who supplied letters, photographs and unrecorded artworks. Many original drawings had resurfaced at a Christie's sale in 2004 from the estate of James W. Murray, Blackie's art editor. Her work has since been shown at Chris Beetles Gallery, London, in The Illustrators 2016, The Turn of Women Artists 1837-2018 (2018), The Illustrators (2023) and The Illustrators 2024, and an original drawing for the Morris volume featured in the online exhibition Visualizing Camelot at the University of Rochester, New York.
Florence Susan Harrison died in Hove, England, on 5 January 1955, aged 77. In the UK public domain her original artwork is held in the collection of the Bodelan Library, University of Oxford; her illustrated books are held by the British Library, and records of Blackie & Son Ltd, 1794-1997, are held in the University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections.
Michal Mel