What first seizes the eye in Goblin Market is the uneasy meeting of innocence and menace: a golden-haired girl, her hand raised as if in startled negotiation, sits surrounded by a circle of animal-faced goblins. Their faces—cat, bird, rat, wolf—are rendered with a sly attention to both humor and threat, their bodies crowding in, their claws and paws proffering baskets and platters heaped with impossible fruit. The girl’s pale skin and calm blue dress set her apart from the riot of textures and colors around her, while the forest behind seems to close in, its trunks like bars.

The light falls most clearly on her face and hair, pulling the viewer into her moment of decision, while the goblins’ eyes and outstretched hands draw us into their world of barter and temptation. Created in 1920 for The Book of Fairy Poetry, this illustration by Warwick Goble belongs to a moment when British book art reveled in the strange and the supernatural. Fairy tales and poems were newly popular among adults as well as children, and artists like Goble were commissioned to bring these stories to life in lush, unsettling color. The world that produced this image was one eager for enchantment, but also alert to the shadows that lurk in old tales—trading in both beauty and warning.

History has kept few traces of how this particular work was received, but its invitation remains: look again at the girl’s wary gaze, the goblins’ greedy hands, and ask what price is being asked, and by whom.