Cicely Mary Barker is an English artist and author best known for her beautiful "Flower Fairies" series of illustrated books. Barker, born in 1895, trained at the Croydon School of Art starting at age 13 and began her professional career drawing and painting for greeting cards and children's magazines. A gifted artist in water colors, oils, pastels, as well as pen and ink, Barker was inspired by the popularity of fairies in the early twentieth-century to create one of her most famous and enduring work, "Flower Fairies of the Spring", first published in 1923. She followed the commercial and critical success of her first fairy book with "Flower Fairies of the Summer" in 1925. Exquisitely rendered and charmingly detailed, the book is a collection of summer-time flowers and their guardian fairies with accompanying poems and paintings. Barker's work is an amazing combination of both realism and fantasy as she studied and worked hard to make her drawings and paintings as close to the natural world as possible. Barker combined her impressive artistic talent with a lively and playful world of magic and imagination. The result is a timeless series of books that have charmed children and adults for generations. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and reproduces in full color her original illustrations along with their accompanying poems.