The O Museum—a menagerie of artwork and secret doorways inside The Mansion on O Street—has one way or the other packed much more whimsy onto its filled-to-the-brim property. Now residing on the 44-year-old museum are the bronze likenesses of well-known storybook characters, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit—all hailing from the Robert James Studio within the UK.
Together they type a brand new exhibition referred to as “Through the Looking Glass: Exhibition Of Classic Children’s Literature,” which opened this week and is ready to final indefinitely on the unconventional museum the place, when you haven’t been earlier than, practically “everything without a heartbeat” is on the market, says its founder HH Leonards.
Their journeys to O Street started in May, when Leonards visited the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in London. There, she and her associate had been rapid entranced by the artwork of James Coplestone and Robert Ellis—three-time, five-star winners of the present—who work to convey traditional storybook characters to life.
“It was magic,” says Leonards, who didn’t suppose twice about bringing their work to the museum. “On the spot, I asked [Coplestone] to exhibit here.” Roughly six months after assembly, their storybook sculptures—all casts made for the museum—are actually on show. It’s presently their solely exhibition within the U.S.
“Our ambition is to enchant—to take these two dimensional drawings and put them into the three dimensional world and make them look like they are breathing,” Coplestone says. Originally skilled as a e book illustrator, he discovered his approach into sculpting when he started building 3-D fashions of the story characters he was illustrating to higher visualize them from completely different angles. “Storytelling is my passion,” he says. “Ever since I was a little boy, my grandfather would sit me on his lap, tell me stories, and draw little characters—that felt like real love I was getting.”
To convey such tales to life, he and Ellis, his 75-year-old colleague and finest pal, studied the unique prints and drawings of well-known storybooks on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. They then molded the characters in clay—a prolonged course of that took two years only for their depiction of Alice—earlier than pouring and portray bronze casts.
Aside from Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter, you may count on characters from the imaginations of Norman Thelwell, A.A Milne, and Edward Lear. A storybook character of Coplestone’s personal creation, the Barefoot King, will even be on show. “He is from one of my children’s stories,” says Coplestone, holding a small barefoot figurine in a bathrobe with a crown. “He’s a character who is tired of responsibility, so he goes into the garden again and plays.”
Tickets to the museum are $30, although a number of of the sculptures, together with the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts, are viewable from the sidewalk in entrance of the mansion. Others, together with water options—such because the Mad Hatter who may be seen pouring himself a cup of tea—are on show contained in the mansion’s secret again backyard, the place you’ll discover many extra of the characters, together with Pooh Bear and Piglet in addition to Peter Rabbit.
“[Storytelling] is how you survive,” Leonards says. “The world is not always a pleasant place. And in order to survive and have hope, you have to create fantasies. That’s what these characters do. They put you in that place of love and joy.”
