Those who have concerned themselves for a long time with restoring to humanity the fairy tales that had been somewhat glossed over by modern civilization-people such as the Brothers Grimm, though they did not adopt a spiritual-scientific view-understandably had the feeling that they were renewing something that belongs intimately to human nature. After an intellectual culture had done its part for centuries to estrange human souls-including children-collections such as those of the Grimm brothers have rightly found their way into the modern human consciousness. They have again become the common heritage of children's souls. As Spiritual Science becomes more than theory and information in human minds, fairy tales will become more and more the underlying mood of human souls, uniting them increasingly with the spiritual roots of those stories. The illustrations in Three Grimms' Fairy Tales by the German painter Gerard Wagner for "Briar Rose," "Jorinde and Joringle," and "The Star-Taler" represent a unique artistic approach to the illustration of children's books.
Through Wagner's lifelong investigation into how form can arise from objective color experience, the images are attuned individually in a deep way to the mood of each fairy tale and to children's essential moral nature and creative fantasy. The book is a finely illustrated children's book as well as a book of fine art. Three Grimms' Fairy Tales also includes an afterword on painting "out of the color" by Peter Stebbing, director of the Arteum Painting School in Dornach, Switzerland, and a lecture by Rudolf Steiner on fairy tales in the light of spiritual investigation.