Later he turned to decorative painting, like all the representatives of the pre-Raphaelite group. He is one of the most original designers for industrial work in tapestry, next to Morris the most influential leader of the English arts and crafts, and he has collaborated in founding that modern naturalistic tendency of style which will be the art of the future. His designs are always based upon naturalistic motives--the English type of womanhood and the English splendour of flowers. There always predominates a sensitive relationship between the æsthetic character of the forms and their symbolical significance. He always adapts an object of nature so that it may correspond in style with the material in which he works. The way in which he makes use of the noblest models of antiquity and of the Renaissance, and yet immediately transposes them into an English key of sentiment and into available modern forms, is entirely peculiar. And last, but not least, he is a marvellous illustrator. Every one went wild with delight at the close of the sixties over the appearance of his first children's books, _The Faerie Queene_, _The Little Pig who went to Market_, and _King Luckiboy_, the pictures of which were soon displayed upon all patterns for embroidery. And they were followed by others: after 1875 he published _Tell me a Story_, _The First of May--a Fairy Masque_, _The Sirens Three_, _Echoes of Hellas_, and so forth. The two albums _The Baby's Bouquet_ and _The Baby's Opera_ of 1879 are probably the finest of them all. In spite of their childish subjects, the drawings of Walter Crane have such a monumental air that they have the effect of "grand painting." Without imitation he reproduces spontaneously the grace and character of the primitive Florentines. Some of his plates recall "The Dream of Polifilo," and might bear the monogram of Giovanni Bellini. They owe their origin to a profound Germanic sentiment mingled with pagan reminiscences; they are an almost Grecian and yet English art, where fancy like a foolish, dreamy child plays with a brilliant skein of forms and colours. That great artist _George Frederick Watts_ stands quite apart as a personality in himself. In point of substance he is divided from others by not leaning upon poets, but by inventing independent allegories for himself; and in point of form by courting neither the Quattrocento nor the Roman Cinquecento, but rather following the Venice of the later Renaissance. Instead of the marble precision of Squarcione or Mantegna, what predominates in his work is something soft and melting, which might recall Correggio, Tintoretto, or Giorgione, were it not that there is a cooler grey, a subdued light fresco tone in Watts, in place of the Venetian glory of colour.