Aesop's Fables - Video

Aesop's Fables - Video.

Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. His fables are some of the most well known in the world. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today. Many stories included in Aesop's Fables, such as The Fox and the Grapes (from which the idiom "sour grapes" derives), The Tortoise and the Hare, The North Wind and the Sun, The Boy Who Cried Wolf and The Ant and the Grasshopper are well-known throughout the world.

Apollonius of Tyana, a 1st century CE philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop:

    ... like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events. (Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Book V:14).

A prominent figure in the Victorian art world, Walter Crane not only participated in the late nineteenth century's publishing revolution but also led the way toward the Golden Age of Illustration. Crane was instrumental in the transition from simple black-and-white illustrations for children's books to gallery-quality artwork. This original collection features more than one hundred of the influential artist's brilliant images. It constitutes a survey of his paintings as well as a visual history of the development of the first color illustrations.

Few artists of Crane's generation achieved careers as varied and successful as his. This compilation reflects the diversity of his subjects, from images for alphabet books, nursery rhymes, and fairy tales to scenes from stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood to illustrations inspired by the classics of Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Spenser.

I took all the page from  "The Baby’s Own Aesop,"  Crane’s hand lettered and fully illustrated edition of Aesop’s Fables originally published in 1887 and added easy to listen to music. Each page takes one tale from Aesop and presents it with illustrations, initials, borders, embellishments and decorative lettering.

http://vimeo.com/19068635

Walter Crane

Artist: George Frederic Watts