It’s not just the BFG. Picture Matilda<\/a>: you see that uncannily wise face on a five-year-old\u2019s body, intelligent and watchful. Or the Twits: two magnificently repellent creatures rendered in Blake\u2019s scratchy, joyfully anarchic style. Across 18 books and a collaboration that lasted until Dahl\u2019s death in 1990, Blake gave indelible visual life to some of the most cherished characters in children\u2019s literature.<\/p>\n But there is still so much more to the artist and his work. Britain\u2019s first Children\u2019s Laureate and a knight of the realm, Blake is also a Companion of Honour \u2013 one of only 65 living recipients, among them Elton John, Paul McCartney and Judi Dench, to be awarded it for a major contribution to the arts, science or politics. He has illustrated or written more than 500 books \u2013 with global sales topping 45 million \u2013 drawn murals for hospitals and artwork for prisons, and collaborated with everyone from Michael Rosen and Michael Morpurgo to Russell Hoban. At 93, he has not stopped drawing for a single day.<\/p>\n This month sees the opening of the \u00a312.5m Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration in Islington, north London. Housed in a former Victorian waterworks at the imposing New River Head, next to Sadler\u2019s Wells, the centre will permanently dedicate one of its galleries to his archive. Its inaugural exhibition, Quentin Blake: Performance, brings together more than 100 works on paper \u2013 an exploration of theatre through illustration, including circus, acrobatics and the drama of Shakespeare. \u201cFor Quentin,\u201d says Olivia Ahmad, the centre\u2019s artistic director, \u201ca blank sheet of paper is like an empty stage, just waiting for him to draw in the scenery and the characters who will tell his stories.\u201d<\/p>\n As anyone who was once young will know, a Quentin Blake illustration is instantly recognisable \u2013 those windmilling hands, retrouss\u00e9 noses and dots for eyes, expressed in a quivering, interrupted line with watercolour washes that bleed beyond it. Movement plays its part: his characters dart, scramble, and spin, and are often suspended gleefully in mid-air. \u201cHis drawings are fizzing with kinetic energy and are unmistakable,\u201d says Ahmad. \u201cIt\u2019s a bit like when you see the handwriting of someone you know well.\u201d<\/p>\n Born in Sidcup, southeast London, in 1932, Blake \u2013 the son of a civil servant \u2013 grew up with neither books nor any particular tradition of art. At 16, he was submitting cartoons to Punch \u2013 the art editor told him his rough sketches were better than his finished ones, a lesson that shaped everything that followed. He didn\u2019t go to art school; he read English under FR Leavis at Cambridge, spending his evenings in life-drawing classes learning skills that have served him ever since. He taught illustration at the Royal College of Art for more than 20 years. Ahmad points to the contradiction at the heart of his process \u2013 \u201cHe draws quickly, but his work on books is meticulous: Quentin carefully plans each scene, thinking about how a story unfolds, what will keep you turning the page.\u201d<\/p>\n Of all the partnerships that have shaped his career, none has proved more impactful \u2013 or more complicated \u2013 than the one with Dahl. His widow Felicity took to calling them “the odd couple”, Blake\u2019s natural warmth and ungovernable optimism playing against his collaborator’s misanthropy. On Dahl\u2019s now well-documented antisemitism<\/a>, Blake recently told The Telegraph: \u201cI probably disagreed with everything he thought.\u201d<\/p>\n Tellingly, of all their collaborations, only The Enormous Crocodile \u2013 Dahl\u2019s 1978 story about a boastful, scheming reptile who hatches increasingly elaborate plans to catch and eat children, only to be thwarted each time by the other animals of the jungle \u2013 features in the new exhibition. When Blake first saw the manuscript, says Ahmad, he wasn\u2019t sure he could go through with it. \u201cIt\u2019s scary stuff,\u201d she says. His solution was to make it work like a pantomime \u2013 broad colours, broad strokes, the crocodile all leering malevolence, the children he menaces wide-eyed and blissfully unaware. The illustrations bristle with threat and slapstick in equal measure. \u201cThere\u2019s so much action,\u201d says Ahmad. \u201cThat was what Quentin found interesting to draw.\u201d<\/p>\n It was during his time as Children\u2019s Laureate that Blake first conceived the idea of a permanent national home for illustration. That vision took more than 20 years to realise, beginning as the House of Illustration, an exhibition space in King\u2019s Cross that opened in 2014, before the charity secured a 250-year lease on this new Islington site.<\/p>\n A thrilling way to launch it, Quentin Blake: Performance begins with an early caricature of Laurence Olivier. Drawn for Punch in 1957, when Blake was just 24, it shows the great actor as Archie Rice, the washed-up, self-pitying music-hall comedian at the heart of John Osborne\u2019s The Entertainer \u2013 one of the defining performances of the British stage.<\/p>\n![\"Cover](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/download.jpeg\")
Cover art for Roald Dahl\u2019s \u2018Matilda\u2019 by Quentin Blake (Puffin)<\/p>\n![\"\u2018The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/01KT1F85F9TQ5SG1H0MNXA68F7.jpg\")
\u2018The Enormous Crocodile\u2019 (PA)<\/p>\n
![\"Illustrations](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/01KT1F7HMHBYG2YAZABJV04J3W.jpg\")
Illustrations of Macbeth by Quentin Blake on display at the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration in London (PA)<\/p>\n