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"Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic" which
opens this week features around 230 works and artefacts dating
from 1920 onwards, including original illustrations and
manuscripts, such as E.H. Shepard's first portraits of the
honey-loving bear.
The exhibition is not the first examination of real-life
inspirations for Winnie-the-Pooh this year, with a Hollywood
film, "Goodbye Christopher Robin", telling the story of A.A.
Milne and his family while he was creating the character.
The V&A is hoping to attract more young families through its
doors and one of the exhibition's curators Emma Laws felt that
Pooh, who turned 90 last year, was the perfect bear for the job.
"Everybody loves Winnie-the-Pooh, he's inter-generational, so
this is a chance for everybody," Laws told Reuters
In addition to memorabilia, the exhibition examines the real
people and places behind the stories - Milne's son Christopher
who served as the inspiration for Christopher Robin, and Ashdown
Forest in Sussex, which inspired the Hundred Acre Wood.
"Winnie-the-Pooh is a very simple, evocative sort of world in
which you want children to be able to get fully immersed in the
imagination of going into the Hundred Acre Wood," exhibition
designer Tom Piper said.
"So we wanted to make it immersive in lots of different ways. So
there's digital immersion, but equally we've created huge
hand-painted, five meter high versions of the Hundred Acre Wood,
(so) that you can really get the atmosphere of the place.”
Not everyone has such fond childhood memories of Pooh and his
pals, however, Milne's son Christopher wrote in a memoir that he
had a difficult relationship with the character, and had
suffered bullying at school as a result of the books.
(Reporting by Jayson Mansray; writing by Mark Hanrahan in
London; editing by Alexander Smith)
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