Basil Temple Blackwood

Lord Ian Basil Gawaine Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (4 November 18703 July 1917), known as Lord Basil Temple Blackwood, was a British lawyer, civil servant and book illustrator. Early life Temple Blackwood was the third son and fifth child of Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and Hariot Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood. He was born in Clandeboye, Ireland. After spending part of his childhood in Canada, where his father was Governor General, he attended Harrow School. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford in 1891, but never graduated. Whilst at Oxford, he became friends with Hilaire Belloc, with whom he would enjoy long walks and canoeing trips. Illustrations In 1896, Belloc approached Blackwood to illustrate his book of humorous children's verse, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=BRdqYWfpdUcC&pg=PA121 Old Thunder: a life of Hilaire Belloc], Joseph Pearce, Harper Collins Publishers 2001, (p.58)</ref> Blackwood's amusing pen and ink sketches were in a style which has been described as "German expressionism", and were credited only to "B.T.B.". The book was an immediate success. Blackwood went on to illustrate several more of Belloc's books, including: The Modern Traveller (1898), A Moral Alphabet (1899), More Peers (1900), Cautionary Tales for Children (1907) and More Beasts for Worse Children (1910). In the rhyming introduction to the Cautionary Tales, Belloc describes Blackwood's drawings as "...the nicest things you ever saw"''. Some critics claim that there is anti-Semitism in Blackwood's drawings.