In the artistic pecking order, illustration long languished behind what were seen as the fine arts, even though it was the one art form that most of us would come across every single day. Not unrelated to the status issue, illustration came to be regarded as art for children, young children at that.

In the 19th century adult books would be routinely illustrated (Dickens’s illustrators such as Phiz were as much a part of the deal as the novels themselves), but in the 20th the field gradually narrowed. Still, up to the 1970s, even books for teenagers as a rule had pictures. Now, apart from graphic novels, they’re mostly confined to cartoons for the tiny tots.

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Yet illustration remains a form that we encounter as soon as we see a book, which means that the artists have a hold on our emotions in a way that many others don’t. Off the top of our heads, most of us can reel off our favourites: Ronald Searle, Ernest Shepard, Edward Ardizzone, Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Aubrey Beardsley, Tove Jansson, Daumier… How long have you got?

Granted, Chris Beetles Gallery in St James’s gives addicts a regular fix with his annual show. And there are occasional exhibitions on particular illustrators. But as a genre, illustration has struggled for a place in the sun, though in France, it’s regarded very differently.

When I wrote about the dearth of pictures in books some years ago, Quentin Blake observed that ‘there’s a feeling it’s not quite grown up to have pictures’. Posy Simmonds, a peerless illustrator for adults, agreed: ‘There’s a sense that pictures are something you grow out of.’

All that may change now with the opening of the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, just round the corner from Sadler’s Wells in Clerkenwell. It’s housed in a former historic waterworks complex – lots of lovely........

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