The Cave Explorer
Kate Winter’s previous picture book The Fossil Hunter, a biography of paleontologist Mary Anning, won her the 2024 Klaus Flugge Prize awarded to the most promising and exciting newcomer to UK children’s book illustration, specifically recognising a published picture book by a debut illustrator.
In The Cave Explorer she takes another deep dive uniting the distant past with recent historical thinking. It is the story of the discovery in 1940 by a teenage boy, Marcel Ravidat, and his dog of the prehistoric paintings on the walls of a cave at Lascaux in France. It opens with the words: ‘There are many different ways to tell a story. They can be spoken, written down or made of pictures. A good story tells us something about the world, or something about ourselves. The very best stories do both.’
Kate Winter investigates this story plus facts, ideas and theories around it in a variety of ways that encourage further exploration. Following the story of the discovery and its revelation to the world, she narrates its influence on historical research and methodology more broadly and shows historians and archaeologists asking questions. Especially interesting is the work of Annette Laming-Emperaire who sought meaning in patterns in the artwork rather than ‘creating a theory and then looking for evidence that matched’.
The palette Winter uses in the illustrations, predominantly featuring shades of brown and bluish-grey as befits the gloomy interior of the caves, only serves to make lighting up the paintings even more vivid. This is particularly striking in one of several uses of flap folds, when opened, reveal Marcel’s first sight of the paintings, lit up by his oil lamp.
