Features

Good books, old friends

Details

By Kara G. Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

Hits: 295

Illustration in children's books is studied as art in children's literature courses offered in library schools and other college programs.

Rebecca J. Lukens, author of A Critical Handbook of Children's Literature (Harper-Collins, 1990), explains the notion of illustration as art:

"Like other art forms, illustration uses symbolic language for communication … It creates its own illusions of reality, often dissimilar to those of the practical world, and by use of figurative devices of all kinds, it opens for us an imaginary vision."

The connection between children's illustrations and art is also examined in Alma Gilbert's Maxfield Parrish: A Treasury of Art and Children's Literature (Atheneum Book for Young Readers, 1995, 88 pages).

Like me before I was given this book as a Christmas present last year, many of you may never have heard of Maxfield Parrish. But if you look through this compilation of his illustrations from several children's books, some of the pictures may be familiar.

The book is Gilbert's tribute to the power of Parrish's illustrations to spark her childhood imagination and later influence the course of her life.

She explains, "My interest in the life and art of Maxfield Parrish can be traced to early childhood and to a passion for beautifully illustrated books of fairy tales."

Gilbert was an only child of aristocratic Mexican parents and her early childhood was marked by "great economic and political upheaval." This political climate made it dangerous for her to go out and play. So books, she says, were often her only companions, and "I became a tireless and voracious reader."

She first "encountered the heart-stopping beautiful paintings by Maxfield Parrish" in a copy of The Arabian Nights given to her when she was 10.

Now an art dealer and the owner of a gallery in Burlingame, Calif., she acquired her first Parrish paintings in 1973. She also established and ran for seven years the Maxfield Parrish Museum in "the Oaks," his Cornish, N.H. home.

Perusing this book, which includes a biography of Parrish, his illustrations from various children's books accompanied by the texts he was illustrating and notes on the techniques and materials he used, is like attending an art exhibit.

According to Gilbert, Parrish (1870-1966) first started illustrating children's books in 1897 with L. Frank Baum's Mother Goose in Prose. He went on to illustrate popular children's books in their day such as Kenneth Grahame's The Golden Age (1899), Douglas Wiggin's and Nora A. Smith's The Arabian Nights: Their Best-Known Tales (1909) and Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonderbook and Tanglewood Tales (1910).

Now, Gilbert says, "Parrish's paintings are owned by such great institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art … and the Detroit Institute of Art, attesting to the fact that Parrish made the transition from illustration to fine art quite effortlessly."

The illustrations are the hallmark of this book. You will more than likely look for more child-friendly versions of the fairy tales, myths and poems than those Parrish illustrated to read to children. The texts selected by Gilbert for this book represent the formality of a former age.

But one can see how easily Parrish's illustrations could appeal to both a child's imagination and the eye of a connoisseur of paintings.

He was capable of satirical wit in cartoon-like drawings for the Mother Goose rhyme "Old King Cole" and breathless wonder in a portrait of Atlas holding up the sky for Hawthorne's interpretation of the Greek myth "The Three Golden Apples."

An illustration he did for the Brothers Grimm's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is an intriguing contrast to the Walt Disney illustrations our generation has been conditioned to associate with the tale. The dwarf standing guard over Snow White's glass casket after she has been poisoned by the wicked queen has the mien of a gargoyle. You wouldn't dare name him Grumpy although he looks it.

Gilbert successfully keeps the reader interested in Parrish's paintings by interspersing exotic illustrations, like those for Hawthorne's The Pomegranate Seeds, with suddenly plain, down-to-earth ones, like that of a very serious Mary for the Mother Goose rhyme "Mary, Mary Quite Contrary."

Overall, Gilbert's book is an enthusiastic appreciation of Parrish's talents, but to me it is especially interesting as a testament to how much a child can be influenced by one illustrator.

Good illustrations in books can shape our imaginations just as much as good writing and well-conceived characters can.

For me, the visual images of Laura Ingalls Wilder created by Garth Williams, the illustrator of the Little House books, immediately spring to mind whenever I think about her.

Williams has had a more lasting impression on me than any other illustrator. But everyone is different. In the children's literature course I took in library school, it was fun to compare works by a variety of illustrators who had influenced people and to hear a favorite illustration talked about as if it were a painting by Monet.

If you have children why not celebrate National Children's Book Week (Nov. 18 to Nov. 24) by turning your home into an art gallery? Go to the library, check out a selection of picture books and put their imaginations to work.

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's contributing editor and research consultant since 1989. She has a master's degree in information and library studies from the University of Michigan and works for the Genesee District Library.

• < Prev
• Next >