Bloomin’ Brilliant: The Life and Work of Raymond Briggs: a show that will leave Briggs fans walking in the air

Late in life, the author-illustrator Raymond Briggs said, “I don’t know anything much about children. I try to avoid them whenever possible.” One suspects he didn’t mean this, though, and was just playing up to a curmudgeonly persona shared by many of his books’ protagonists – notably, the titular figure in 1973’s Father Christmas, who hates “blooming chimneys”.

A splendid retrospective charting Briggs’s career began just before his death two years ago, aged 88, and has toured venues from Cambridge to Kirkcudbright. At its core are early drafts of the illustrations that fill his books. Its latest stop – Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, where it’s spending five months – is the ideal place to see the show for two reasons.

First, location: just two miles from Briggs’s home in East Sussex, where he produced most of his classic works, including 1978’s The Snowman, which spawned an animated film that’s now a staple of Christmas telly. It is over the South Downs that the eponymous snowman and the boy who made him take their famous flight.

Second, Briggs’s estate has offered the local museum various loans from his house that haven’t been seen elsewhere. These bring the show a personal touch and include a velvet armchair; his working desk, complete with colour-differentiated crayon pots; and a wardrobe’s doors, on which he produced a painting of his parents, shortly after finishing a book about their life together, Ethel and Ernest (1998).

Roughly a third of the 100-plus exhibits are new for Ditchling, supplementing the initial show organised by the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration. At no point, however, does this feel like two exhibitions bolted together. The wardrobe doors, for example, complement a set of (previously exhibited) pencil sketches for Ethel and Ernest. In one sketch, set after their marriage in 1930, Mr and Mrs Briggs debate whether they can afford the mortgage on an £825 house in Wimbledon.

Bridging the gap between picture books and comics, Briggs was a natural storyteller. He could do both happy and sad, duly appealing to adults as well as children. His snowman (spoiler alert) may heartbreakingly melt, but his Father Christmas raises constant laughs.

In the early layout of a page for the latter, we see an image of the subject bare-chested in the shower. An annotation from Briggs below it reads, “Back view, please. No full-frontal… for Father Christmas!”. Interestingly, the author seems to have ignored his own advice, as the same image appears in the finished book.

Briggs honed his draughtsmanship at Wimbledon School of Art and then the Slade. Not that he himself was always happy with it: in a Finnish copy of The Snowman on show, newly found at his house, he made notes in 2014 saying he’d got his most famous character’s arms wrong.

This isn’t a show to turn people onto Briggs’s work. It’s aimed instead at the many people who know and love it already. They will leave itching to read his books anew – proverbially, walking in the air.

Until Oct 27; ditchlingmuseumartcraft.org.uk