No one can possibly tell what tiny detail of a drawing or what seemingly trivial phrase in a story will be the spark that sets off a great flash in the mind of some child, a flash that will leave a glow until the day he dies.
(Robert Lawson, illustrator of Ferdinand (1936))
The value of bedtime reading
As a student of children’s literature since the age of 15, I often become peevish when I read an author’s reminiscence of their bedtime stories. This is Ellen Handler Spitz’s memory from her critical text Inside Picture Books:
If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can even now hear my mother’s voice as she read to me each evening when I was a child. I remember the cadences and inflections, the lilt and verve, of her special reading voice … it embraced me with an auditory ambience of coziness and warmth. In those evening hours, we stretched and grew together. We could be anywhere, with anyone; it was anytime; I was sure I could do, or have, or feel anything; and then, when it was over and all the clouds of make-believe dissolved, the safety of her presence remained to hold me.
Clouds of make-believe, safety, being held — never in my childhood. Yet Lucy Mangan’s delightful Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading made me smile as she recalls, with typical British dry wit, her read-aloud time with her father:
Once lesser activities such as eating, having baths and playing with visiting infants were out of the way, we would have a splendid time together. I am assured there was colouring, Play-Doh moulding and endless games of riding horses to Banbury Cross, but my first real memory is of Dad tucking me in beside him on the long, brown floral sofa that sat on a rug dyed three increasingly violent shades of orange that sat on top of an orange carpet (oh, the 1970s. May you never, never return) and opening a book almost as colourful as our sitting room. It was The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle’s paint ‘n’ tissue-paper collaged account of the larval lepidoptera’s metamorphosis.
We lovers of children’s lit realize the value of bedtime reading: it promotes literacy, increases vocabulary, helps develop imagination, improves reading skills, and strengthens the parent-child bond. But what about children who have never shared a bedtime story? Do their imaginations shrivel, their reading skills flat-line, their vocabularies become stunted by TV ads? Do some kids develop those skills without bedtime stories or looking at picture books?
My summer bedtime ritual amounted to my mother checking my scalp for ticks (we lived in the country), reminding me to wash my feet, and sending me off to bed. (The rest of the year was the same, except for tick check.) No one tucked me in, much less read me a picture book. We had no picture books in the home and I didn’t set foot in a public library until I was nine. There wasn’t much chance of meeting that tiny detail of a drawing or finding that seemingly trivial phrase in a story that would set off a great flash in my mind.
A Happy Discovery
In the fifties, the December issue of Woman’s Day contained a small pull-out calendar for the coming year. Each month featured a seasonal illustration and a quote. Warren Chappel was the original illustrator. When I was seven or so, I tore that year’s calendar from my mother’s magazine. Panels of towns and farms, beaches and cities were perfectly rendered in ink and watercolor, and a teeny black cat was always present. I was enchanted.
The artist’s vignettes seemed meant for my eyes only. I studied the details of a miniature world, one I could control, as I had played with my tiny plastic dinosaurs in our backyard. Critic Jerry Griswold quoted in his book Feeling Like a Kid how British author John Masefield (The Midnight Folk, A Box of Delights) shared a similar feeling. Masefield “paid attention to things close at hand and could stare hours into his box of toys and marbles.” Blegvad’s illustrations aimed at the short focal point of a young child.
Even so, I wondered how the artist could draw such pocket-sized pictures. He must have used wonderful crayons and a magic pencil (I knew nothing of watercolor paints or pen and ink). That little black cat set off not a flash but fireworks in my mind. I found my love for art in a humble grocery store magazine.
Enter Erik Blegvad
A few years later, I checked out a book from my elementary school library called Superstitious? Here’s Why! The little black cat on the cover seemed familiar. Inside, chapters about superstitions were headed with humorous line drawings. In each was that black cat. Sometimes I had to look close to spot him. The person who had illustrated the book was listed on the title page — Erik Blegvad. Instantly I realized this person had also made the pictures for the Woman’s Day calendar. It wasn’t just the little cat. It was the precise way he drew.
At the age of ten I had uncovered a secret — artists didn’t make pictures only once. It was their job. Besides picture books, children’s fiction in the fifties and sixties usually included interior black and white artwork. Illustrations were part and parcel of novels. The Borrowers series was richer for its loose-lined art by Beth and Joe Krush. Garth Williams’ illustrations for Charlotte’s Web made the animals real. Louise Fitzhugh’s odd, off-center sketches perfectly suited her odd, off-center novels, Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret.
Erik Blegvad’s illustrations for my all-time favorite children’s novel, The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton, made me want to live forever in the wedding cake Victorian house he depicted on the cover.
I tried copying that house, but my hesitant pencil was no match for Blegvad’s sure pen.
He was best known for his art for Bedknob and Broomstick, written by Mary Norton of The Borrowers fame. Inside illustrations feature his signature black cat but the dust jacket dazzles with a brilliant pink and blue twilight sky that makes me wish I could bottle those colors and drink them. Blegvad illustrated the first American version of The Borrowers, which was serialized in Woman’s Day magazine. He felt his scenes for The Borrowers were among his best.
Erik Who?
You’ll find only a skimpy Wikipedia page for an illustrator who was working on his 107th book when he died at the age of 90 in 2014. He won no big awards. He was a journeyman illustrator who loved to make art and was very good at it because he worked at his craft daily.
Erik Blegvad was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1923. In his illustrated memoir, Self-Portrait: Erik Blegvad, he said, “My father, his father, and his father’s father all had drawing talent and all hoped to become artists: none of them did.”
Of his training, he says only, “I went to art school.” He moved to post-war Paris in 1947 with “my bike, plenty of drawings, all my money, and ten pounds of butter. ‘As good as gold, my mother had said.’” His first assignment was the cover of a French magazine, Réalitiés. He worked on a nightstand in his hotel room, his only supplies one brush, green poster paint, and a tube of white tempera.
His line work made his career and he was content illustrating the work of writers. He said, “Illustrating a children’s book gives me a role which seems natural, accompanist rather than soloist” and urged him to draw “people, objects, and worlds I never knew existed.” Three-time Caldecott winner Marcia Brown said of his style, “Working in black and white line or tinted drawings, Erik Blegvad carries on a tradition we have associated with Ernest Shepard. His decorations and illustrations on a small scale are very accessible to a child and provide the comfort of the known without ever sinking into the mannered or the banal.”
Blegvad’s work was also praised by Maurice Sendak, “[His] drawings per se are superb. Densely textured, brimming with esoteric detail, they yet manage to convey a lightness of touch, a quality of line and color…” Blegvad was a master of hatching (close parallel lines) and cross-hatching (close parallel lines layered over hatching) to create lights and darks, texture, atmosphere, distance, and night scenes.
In an example from Superstitious? Here’s Why! wide cross-hatching becomes the plaid on the far-right man’s suit. Curved hatching forms bark on the tree. A series of hatched lines indicates sky above and water below. Look for the black cat!
His landscapes made great use of white space. With a few lines, grass borders the road. The tree on the right is leafy on the left side. Only a few looped lines indicate the other side of the tree. Our eye fills in the middle.
We tend to read pictures from left to right. Blegvad’s composition leads our eye from the figure on the far left, to the house, to the taller tree, to the central image of the car, up the smaller tree, down the telephone pole to the nearly hidden house and finally to the rabbit. White space lets our brain “draw” the rest of the scene, making us co-creator.
Branching Out
While in Paris, Blegvad met an American artist. He and Lenore married and moved to New York City. The first children’s book he illustrated was the somberly titled The Story of Peace and War by Tom Galt, in 1953. From then on, his pen kept busy. He illustrated the Woman’s Day calendars from 1955 to 2004. One of his best-known books is Judith Viorst’s The Tenth Good Thing About Barney.
He illustrated his wife Lenore’s children’s books and collections of children’s poetry.
His editor asked him to translate and illustrate Andersen’s fairy tales.
In a lecture he gave at the Library of Congress in 1987, Blegvad admitted: “I looked forward to translating the tales, but the idea of illustrating Andersen did not appeal to me. This can best be explained by the enormous admiration I have always had for the illustrations in a volume of Andersen’s tales I knew in my childhood, drawings I knew and loved before I knew how to read.”
He fell in love with the pen and ink illustrations by Vilhelm Pedersen (1866). “It seems to me that the tales are best illustrated when the artist allows their subtle poetry and their understated quaint humor to be mirrored in the illustrations. The artist need not overemphasize; he need only suggest. His palette should never shine richer than Andersen’s printed word.”
Blegvad’s biggest project was The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook. In 1962, he was chosen to illustrate this tome of more than 400 pages and over 500 recipes. This was no ordinary cookbook, but rather part memoir, part recipe collection, part work of art.
Erik spent four months living on an abandoned plantation in Jamaica with his family while he churned out hundreds of drawings. The dust jacket front is illustrated in full-color, as is the back (a different scene). The paper-over-boards cover sports a full wrap-around color landscape. Endpapers are lavishly illustrated. Inside on every single double-spread are two or more vignettes, some in color. When published in 1963, this lavish cookbook was the first ever to be a New York Times best-seller. Erik did all that work wearing a three-piece suit and tie, his handlebar mustache impeccably groomed, as he did every day, no matter the weather.
“I never lost the visual imagination I had as a child. My earliest drawings were inspired by stories and tales.”
(Erik Blegvad)
(photo: Simon & Schuster)
I met Erik and Lenore Blegvad at a reception at the Danish Embassy in Washington in the late 1980s. A friend wangled me an invitation. White-haired, straight-backed, elegantly-dressed, the Blegvads were Vikings. I nearly fainted when we were introduced and have no memory what I said. But I felt then as I still do that Erik Blegvad’s drawings set me to writing my own stories. I’ve wanted all my life to be an illustrator, too, but while I could teach myself to write, I needed training to be an illustrator. Sometimes it is enough to love something you can’t do.
I was lucky to stumble on that Woman’s Day calendar and luckier still to have weekly library periods in elementary school. Our library was small. Students in first to third grade could check out books from a single bookcase. But it was enough to give me my first delightful taste of picture books, help me develop visual literacy, and turn me into a lifelong reader.
Today hundreds of illustrated books for children are published each year. Many libraries offer storytime for toddlers and time afterward to choose a book to take home. Discount stores such as Walmart and Target sell a variety of books for children, making it more affordable to own books.
Today we also have digital devices that are often handed to very young children to keep them quiet. Older children may go to bed with their tablet that allows access to games, stories, and activities, not to mention unhealthy blue light. A poor substitute for a quality picture book that would allow a child to linger over details, trace finely-executed lines with a fingertip to claim the image as their own.
Writing in the Horn Book magazine in 1940, Robert Lawson, who had earned both a Newbery and a Caldecott, said: “I do not consider that there is, or should be, such a thing as a children’s illustrator. Trying to rise to the levels demanded by the clear ideals of children is a far greater task [but also] a much more satisfying accomplishment.”
Thank heavens there are people who dedicate their lives as children’s illustrators. People like Erik Blegvad whose drawings continued in the mind and came to life on the page. Those artists bring so much pleasure to children, whether shared with a parent or enjoyed by themselves.
Sources
Batchelor, Julie Forsyth and Claudia de Lys. Superstitious? Here’s Why! New York: Harcourt Brace World, 1954.
Blegvad, Erik. Self-Portrait: Erik Blegvad. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979.
Brown, Marcia. Lotus Seeds: Children, Pictures, and Books. New York: Scribner, 1986.
Griswold, Jerry. Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Jagusch, Sybille A. Hans Christian Andersen: From an Artist’s Point of View, Washington: Library of Congress, 1988.
Mahony, Bertha, Ruth Hill Viguers, Marcia Dalphin. Illustrators of Children’s Books 1946 – 1956. Boston: The Horn Book, 1958.
Mangan, Lucy. Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading. London: Vintage, 2018.
Palfy, Georgina, ed. Artist’s Drawing Techniques. New York: DK, 2017.
Sendak, Maurice. Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1988.
Spitz, Ellen Handler. Inside Picture Books. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Candice, there are so many delicious bits of information in this piece about Erik Blegvad. I’ve read it through three times and it repeatably triggers the equivalent of children’s literature endorphins in my mind. Thank you for your obvious love of the art and writing of books for children. Keep these wonderful articles coming!
Steve: Oh, how I loved this man’s art. I tried copying his buildings, his cats, and his trees. Of course I fell short and was never handy with pen and ink. You never know what will spark a child’s imagination. I’m glad I figured out as a kid to recognize art styles in children’s books. It was my own personal art history course! There will be more articles, you betcha.
I immediately recognized the cover for “Superstitious? Here’s Why!” a book I checked out (probably multiple times) from my elementary school library. Unfortunately my library doesn’t have Erik Blegvad’s memoir, but I just requested “Bed Knobs and Broomstick, with his illustrations. I’m eager to read it, pour over his drawings! Thank you, Candice!
David: Someone else read that book! I felt like the only kid in the universe who read the print off Superstitious? Here’s Why! My mother’s family, part English, part German, was amazingly superstitious people. So that book made me realize there were many more folkloric beliefs besides “Never put a hat on the bed or you’ll have bad luck.” (I still don’t.) Bedknobs is an eye-opener. Like you, I only came upon this book recently. Enjoy it when it comes!
This rich, delightful article brought back so many memories for me, not the least of which was my undying love for The Diamond in the Window. Thank you, Candace, for highlighting the whimsical magic of Erik Blegvad!
Apologies for misspelling your name, Candice.
It happens all the time. The latest, on a picture book coming out in January! Where are the copyeditors?
Joyce: I’m a huge fan of your books and use them when I teach poetry! But I’m an enormous fan of The Diamond in the Window. I had to be married on Valentine’s Day (in 2 feet of snow) because of the chapter “The Bride of Snow.” I started reading Thoreau because of this book. When I met Jane once, I told her how much the book meant to me. She was very kind and I later learned that I was the millionth person to tell her that. That book changed lives!