He began a legal career, reading law at
Trinity College, Cambridge and training as a
barrister at the
Inns of Court in London, before turning to a career in art. As a student at the
Slade School of Fine Arts under
Alphonse Legros he exhibited until 1887 at the
Grosvenor Gallery with Sir
Edward Burne-Jones. He specialized in mythological and allegorical themes. Among Batten's large paintings are
The Garden of Adonis: Amoretta and Time,
The Family,
Mother and Child,
Sleeping Beauty: The Princess Pricks Her Finger,
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and
Atalanta and Melanion. In the 1890s Batten illustrated a series of
fairy tale collections edited by
Joseph Jacobs, who was a member of the
Folklore Society (and editor of its journal 1890–93): at least
English Fairy Tales,
Celtic Fairy Tales,
Indian Fairy Tales,
More English Fairy Tales, and
More Celtic Fairy Tales from 1890 to 1895 and ''Europa's Fairy Book
(1916). (The latter has also been issued as European Folk and Fairy Tales
.) He also illustrated English versions of Tales from the Arabian Nights and Dante's Inferno''. Batten also wrote two books of poetry and a book on animal and human flight. At the end of the 1890s he turned to the painting technique of
egg tempera and played an important part in its revival with Birmingham artists such as
Arthur Gaskin. His
Pandora in this medium was exhibited at the
Royal Academy in 1913 and presented to
Reading University in 1918, where it has now been restored. Batten also served as a Secretary to the
Society of Painters in Tempera and published in 1922 an article on
The Practice of Tempera Painting. There is an article & bibliography in Studies 86 of the Imaginative Book Illustration Society https://bookillustration.org == Gallery ==