Tasha Tudor, a children’s book illustrator made famous for the 1944 edition of “Mother Goose” died last Wednesday at the age of 92.
Tudor was also the illustrator for the 1962 editions of “The Secret Garden” and “The Night Before Christmas.” She was the runner up for the Caldecott Medal two times; once in 1945 for “Mother Goose” and once in 1957 for “1 is One”, her book of poems.
With the royalties from “Mother Goose,” Tudor purchased a rundown house from the 1790s in New Hampshire that had no electricity or running water. On 450 acres, she raised four children, who sometimes posed for illustrations in period garb.
Her chosen lifestyle came from “nostalgia for a day and time that was more peaceful and slow,” Tudor told the Chicago Tribune in 1991. When she went to town, her children “were very careful to walk a good 10 or 12 feet behind me so that they wouldn’t be associated with . . . a rather different-looking woman.”
Later, she figured she must have done something right when three of her children adopted her lifestyle as adults.
She credited the commercialism of her art to the need to earn a living after divorcing her husband, Thomas L. McCready, whom she married in 1938. An author and suburbanite, he was not cut out for such a rural existence.
“If I had married a man who could have supported me I would have ended up making paper dolls and gardening. But the wolf at the door is very good for people,” Tudor said in the Tribune.
Information from the LA Times
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International Herald Tribune
Associated Press
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