Kathleen Frances Barker

Kathleen Frances Wright Barker (2 January 1901 – 1 April 1963), known professionally as K. F. Barker, was an English illustrator and writer of children's books, based in Harrogate, West Yorkshire, England.

Barker's illustrations appeared in at least thirty books, most of which were written by herself. She specialised in ink and pencil drawings, mainly of pet dogs of mixed breed, but also of horses and other animals. For a 1936 reprint of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, Barker provided the illustrations. Besides functioning as book illustrations, her drawings were also sold as prints. In the 1950s, small versions of her dog drawings were reproduced on Stratton powder compacts.

During Barker's lifetime her first book, Just Dogs, was her most popular work, and it attracted the critics' attention when first published. When some book-reviewers mistook her nom de plume to be that of a man, her publisher repeated the error on the dust jacket of her book without contradiction. However, by 1937 The Yorkshire Post had discovered that she was "Miss Barker".

Background Barker's grandfather, Benjamin Barker, was a weaving overlooker or supervisor. the daughter of Jonas Robinson, a shoemaker. Lydia Robinson was a worsted weaver. who was born in Great Horton, Bradford. Wright Barker left Bradford and worked as an artist in Edwinstowe and Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, then moved to Hampstead. Barker's mother was Ellen Mary Alcock, Her siblings were: Gladys Wright Barker, Doris Wright Barker, PhD, who was a teacher and writer, and Reginald Wright Barker.

Barker was a sportswoman, and in her youth her free time was occupied with, "riding, beagling and otter hunting", Her neighbour, who knew her and received gifts of books from her during his childhood, described her as, "a daunting and rather reclusive old lady ... gruff but kind". She was buried at Stonefall Cemetery not far from her parents and alongside her sister Gladys.

Personality In her introduction to Just Dogs (1933), Barker speaks her mind about the cross-breed dogs that she has drawn, and about her own attitude to them. At age 32, she is not the retiring and poorly-educated spinster of Victorian popular imagination:

It was not possible for Barker to find commissions during the Second World War, but she started publishing again in the 1950s.

Reviews Just Dogs (1933) and reprints

This early book, published at a price of 10s 6d , drew attention. A Country Life advertisement of 1935 quotes a Glasgow Herald review: "K.F. Barker draws a dog almost as well as Mr Dowd does a child ...".

In the Western Mail''', the Welsh reviewer Frederick John Mathias, who could at other times be "bruising" and "scarifying" according to Elisabeth Inglis-Jones, discusses Just Dogs in 1933:

In 1933, Time and Tide magazine, assuming incorrectly that K.F. Barker is a man, reviews Just Dogs thus: Time and Tide was not the only publication to carry the assumption that K.F. Barker indicated a man. John O'London's Weekly has this undated review: "Mr K.F. Barker has an uncanny skill in drawing dogs. He can put a dog's whole character into the expression in its eye". Moreover, the dust cover of the 1937 reprint of Just Dogs carries that quotation without demur. The same dust cover carries a second quotation – also undated – from the Times Literary Supplement, and part of the same quote was repeated in a 1935 Country Life'' advertisement:

These delicate pencil drawings, beautifully reproduced, will be a delight to every dog lover; the artist has caught his models on their lawful and unlawful occasions in characteristic attitudes, and has added some obita dicta on dogs and their ways to accompany them by way of text. Of Barker's Himself (1935), the Shrewsbury Chronicle says: The illustrations, from pencil and pen and ink sketches by the author, are charming". Regarding Barker's 1937 book, Just Pups, the Yorkshire Evening Post comments:

Publications

Note: this may be an incomplete list.