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Barbara Cooney was an American author born August 6th, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Smith in 1938. She received a degree in art history. Soon she began her career by becoming an illustrator for children's books. Sadly, her career plans were disrupted when World War II began, and she enrolled in the Women's Army Corps in 1942. After serving time in the army, she was married and devoted to her career full time as an illustrator. After countless illustrations, she soon began writing her own children's books.Barbara traveled to become familiar with foreign folklore, unfamiliar landscapes, and indigenous art styles.

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This story tells of Eleanor Roosevelt's childhood before she became a Roosevelt. She had an unfortunate childhood and experienced quite a lot of troubles. As she grew up without her mother and later her father, she was sent to an orphanage where she started to find her place in the world. As she became more distinguished and experienced, she would become The First Lady of The United States.

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This book is a tale of an elderly aunt and her niece making the world a more beautiful place. The story begins with Miss Rumphius telling stores of faraway places to a group of children. Miss Rumphius begins to flashback to when she was a child. Her grandfather encouraged her to do something that will make the world more beautiful. Miss Rumphius travels the world in her adult years, and meets people all over the world. She returns home after hurting her back on a trip, and contemplates what she could do to make the world more beautiful. As she sees Lupine flowers growing outside of her window, she has an idea. She plants Lupines all over her town, and gains a reputation as "the crazy old lady". The story resumes to the setting of her telling her niece and other children about it. Her niece says "one day I will travel the world too", to which Miss Rumphius says "you must do something to make the world more beautiful."

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The Chanticleer and the Fox is a story about A Rooster coming face to face with his fears. One morning the chanticleer awoke from a frightening dream of a fox devouring him. He convinced himself it was just a dream and he had no need to become worried for his life. As a fox approaches, he flatters the chanticleer into singing with his eyes closed. The fox captures him, but the chanticleer manages to escape. He declare that he will never be fooled by flattery again.

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The story, Hattie and the Wild Waves is a story of a German immigrant family. The family comes to America and starts their own woodworking business. They become a wealthy family, and Hattie the main character is a very independent little girl who enjoys painting pictures that her family enjoy. This story also shows all of the rules that Hattie's family especially her mom had for Hattie. This story tells of their big German family and all of Hattie's adventures. At the end of the story Hattie, comes to a realization. She realizes she is going to walk a different path than her family and do what she wants to pursue a career in art.

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Focused on the lives of three women rendered in detailed paintings by Barbara Cooney, this exhibition explores how Cooney crafted rich biographies in text and image.

Thursday, August 4, 2016 | 4:30 p.m. | Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center

Lecture, "Travels with Hattie & Eleanor: Researching Biography with Barbara Cooney"
Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorate Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, speaks about the research of Barbara Cooney, her aunt, to prepare paintings for Hattie and the Wild Waves and Eleanor.

Free and open to the public.

Saturday, August 6, 2016 | 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. | Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Family Saturday at the Museum of Art focusing onBarbara Cooney: Drawing Biography. Bowdoin College students lead the morning's activities for families. Enjoy a tour of the exhibition, Barbara Cooney: Drawing Biography, hear readings of three Barbara Cooney books, and create an illustrated story of your own!

Free and open to the public.

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Focused on the lives of three women rendered in detailed paintings by Barbara Cooney, this exhibition explores how Cooney crafted rich biographies in text and image. Thursday, August 4, 2016 | 4:30 p.m. | Kresge Auditorium, Visual Arts Center Lecture, "Travels with Hattie & Eleanor: Researching Biography with Barbara Cooney"Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Anthony W.

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The Ox Cart Man is a story of a man who makes a living with everything he has in his ox cart. This tale begins with all the goods his family made themselves. The goods included a shawl his wife knit, mittens his daughter made, and candles they made together. He travels into a market where he sells all the goods to the people in the market. Then he sold his ox cart, and his ox. With the money he received from selling the goods, he walked into Portsmouth Market and buys everything his family and home needed. He returns home to his family where they begin to make everything he sold in the market again. He even made a new cart and had baby ox in his barn.

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Barbara Cooney has won awards for her illustrative work as well as her own books. She won two Caldecott awards and a National Book Award. Her work on Chanticleer and the Fox  won her a Caldecott medal. Her book, The Ox-Cart Man also won a Caldecott medal.  Her book Miss Rumphius won a National Book Award. Personally, I read the Ox-Cart Man and Miss Rumphius. They were both wonderful books, and very enjoyable to read.

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Illustrations © Barbara Cooney Porter*

Nineteen fifty-nine was a year of soft amusements for children. Dr. Seuss's zany Happy Birthday to You! arrived in bookstores and Mattel introduced Americans to the Barbie doll and her frozen plastic gaze. On TV, suburban comedies like Father Knows Best and Dennis the Menace administered doses of mild humor laced with bland moral guidance.
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But the Caldecott Medal, the premier American award for picture books, registered a note of dissent. It recognized Chanticleer and the Fox, the first picture book written by a young illustrator named Barbara Cooney. Adapted from the salty Middle English of The Canterbury Tales, the book tells the story of a proud rooster, Chanticleer, who falls prey to a fox's flattery. Just as the fox is about to devour him, the rooster turns the tables, tricks the fox into opening his mouth, and escapes. The book ends with the rooster and the fox conversing, each ruing his own foolishness and impulsiveness.

In her acceptance speech for the award, the small blond author, gesturing with her long hands, conceded the anomaly of her book. "Much of what I put into my pictures," she admitted, "will not be understood." But she had chosen to write it because she thought that the "children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting." "It does not hurt them," Cooney insisted before her audience of senior librarians and educators, to hear about the real stuff of life, about "good and evil, love and hate, life and death." (She did not say so that evening, but she had already experienced a good bit of each.) She vowed that she would never "talk down to-or draw down to-children."

Recommended Reading

Children's books are more than just entertainment. They reflect how a society sees its young and itself. By shaping the attitudes and aspirations of children, they help shape the world those children will grow up to inherit. Barbara Cooney went on to have a long and celebrated career in American picture books. She illustrated or wrote some 100, including modern classics such as Miss Rumphius and Ox-Cart Man (which garnered her another Caldecott Medal, in 1980). Her books are still beloved, nearly two decades after her death, by readers who admire their visual charm and rich historical storytelling. But Cooney's greatest gifts, manifest in her work from the start, are more profound. Her singular vision of young Americans and her unique ideas about how to write for them make her books more relevant to Americans today-and perhaps more necessary-than ever before.

I first discovered Cooney when a friend gave my 3-year-old daughter a copy of Miss Rumphius (1982). As happens with some children and some books, Suzanne demanded to hear it over and over. The deceptively simple story follows Alice Rumphius through the arc of her life. The book begins with the young girl listening to her immigrant grandfather's "stories of faraway places." She declares that she, too, will travel and then return to live in a home by the sea. Her grandfather likes her idea, but adds that she must also "make the world more beautiful." "All right," Alice says, and for the rest of the book she strives toward her three goals. On the next-to-last page, we see the circle of her life completed as Alice's niece-also named Alice-has the same conversation with her now-aged namesake in her home by the sea.

As the readings multiplied, instead of becoming tired of the book I found myself more and more immersed. There is much to like in Miss Rumphius. Cooney's pictures, in rich colors with a spare, faux-naïf flatness that evokes American folk painting, are filled with fine details that catch the eye. Alice's journey to "make the world more beautiful" is touching. The cyclical, generational architecture of the story, in which the young girl of the first pages is an old woman by the end, is very satisfying.

Miss Rumphius (1982) © Barbara Cooney Porter.

Still, the story pulled at something more in me, something deeper. Cooney draws the portrait of a rare kind of person: someone with an inner compass who allows herself to be guided by it even when the course it charts is not so easy. Miss Rumphius never marries and has no family of her own. (Cooney leaves unstated that this decision would have made her highly unusual in the book's early-20th-century setting.) Alice encounters obstacles and setbacks on her path, as we all do, but she remains absolutely steady, absorbing the judgments of others and her physical failings with equanimity. Without the slightest hint of preaching, Cooney models for her young readers how they can live an intentional life, one in which they imagine a future for themselves and go toward it without fear.

What impressed me most about this portrait was Cooney's refusal to sugarcoat it. Following her own course, Alice lives a solitary life. Cooney explores with unsparing frankness the loneliness enlaced with her protagonist's self-possession. Though Alice makes "friends she would never forget" everywhere along her journey, Cooney dwells visually on her moments of solitude. There she stands alone beside her house by the sea; there she goes, accompanied only by a cat, scattering lupine seeds to make the world more beautiful. After she starts her sowing, the people of her town dismiss her as "That Crazy Old Lady." Don't think it's easy, Cooney seems to whisper to her readers, to live such a self-directed life.

Miss Rumphius (1982) © Barbara Cooney Porter.

Barbara Cooney knew what it meant to be lonely. She was born 100 years ago, in 1917 in Brooklyn, to a prosperous German Irish family. Both sides of her family had risen from immigrant roots to wealth and social prominence by the turn of the 20th century. Cooney's father went to Yale, her mother attended the elite Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, and Cooney herself matriculated at Smith College.

Cooney was the odd one out in her family. Her father, Russell, playing the conservative patriarch, favored her three male siblings. The slight, unconventional girl found her greatest happiness during summers at the family's compound in Waldoboro, Maine. The little New England town settled by Germans in the 18th century had a comfortable feeling for Cooney and her mother.

After finishing college, in 1938, she returned to New York hoping to write for children. She had little formal artistic training, and her career got off to a spluttering start. The small but prestigious publisher Farrar & Rinehart issued three charming chapter books, all set on the Maine coast, which she wrote and illustrated in plain black and white. None of them had great success.

Soon after her first book appeared, Cooney met and quickly married Guy Murchie, a tall and worldly writer, and a son of one of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders. Within the space of three years they had two children, whom Cooney named Gretel and Barnaby, after characters in classic fables. But the marriage did not last. Cooney discovered that Murchie was a "cad" and a "womanizer," as her children later put it. Having suffered through several painful years, she decided to move out.

At a time when divorced single parenthood was exceedingly rare, striking out on her own cannot have been simple. Cooney's father and twin brother had disapproved of her marriage and disowned her. She supported her family by setting aside her own writing and turning full-time to illustration. She took on seemingly every project she was offered, including a collection of folk songs for children and several progressive educational tracts, with titles like Teacher Listen, the Children Speak. She integrated her small family into her work, setting up an antique drafting table in the living room and using her children as models.

In 1949, Cooney remarried and settled in Pepperell, Massachusetts. She and her new husband, the town physician, Charles Talbot Porter, had two more children. In spite of their newfound stability, though, Cooney and her family stood out. In a town where almost no women of her class had a career, she regularly put in six-hour days at her desk, illustrating as many as half a dozen books a year. Just as unusual, Cooney interacted with her children as though they were not simply her charges but her friends. She eagerly encouraged their creative impulses. They built canoes, tried to mine for coal in the yard, and put on a circus complete with a lion tamer and a high-wire act. And every night, the whole family came together for long discussions over a late, candlelit dinner.

Barnaby, the main character of The Little Juggler (1961), the second picture book Cooney wrote, might have been at home in the Porter household of the 1950s. He is an orphaned tumbler living in medieval France. In Cooney's version of the often retold French legend, the penniless boy is chagrined that he has no Christmas gift to offer the Virgin Mary. Even without possessions, though, he realizes that he still has his tricks. On Christmas Eve, he sneaks into a chapel and performs before a statue of the Virgin until he collapses. Two monks are scandalized by what they take to be his levity. But when the Virgin appears and revives the little tumbler, they realize their error and allow him to stay with them.

Cooney's Barnaby is unlike the Barnaby that one finds in most other versions of the tale. In her hands, the story is not about the naive wisdom of a child or a simpleton. Cooney reimagines Barnaby as the equal of any adult. He suffers real penury and makes deliberate decisions that lead to his offering in dance. The Virgin's rebuke of the monks and her embrace of the child serve as supernatural confirmation of the child's natural parity with his elders.

Barnaby, wittingly or not, is part of a very old argument about the nature of children, which Americans have been having both in and out of books since long before there was a United States. Are children basically like adults, or are they essentially different from us? In premodern times, the French scholar Philippe Ariès famously argued, there was no childhood in the sense that we understand it. Children were imagined as little adults, just the way that they were depicted in many paintings. Books for them were made to match. When New England children studied the alphabet in The New England Primer, for instance, they learned that they had to choose whether they would be sinners or saints, whether they wanted to live or die.

In the early 19th century, a "Romantic vision of childhood" (as the historian Steven Mintz calls it) supplanted these earlier ideas. Middle-class Victorians reconceived of childhood as an idyll, free from worry and fears of all kinds. They thought that it had to be so, because they imagined their children as fragile and incapable beings. To enjoy this period of life, children had to be shielded from the discomfiting realities of grown-up existence. It is no surprise that Victorian books for children skewed toward sanitized fairy tales, tame fantasies, and anachronistic histories. More than a century later, these notions continue to echo in the vast number of children's books that paint a rosy, untroubled picture of the world, as though that were all young minds were able to bear.

For Cooney, the Victorian vision of children made no sense. Influenced by her experiences as a child and as a parent, she thought that children were moral and intellectual agents-and should be taught to see themselves as such. (Her encounters with progressive education may have also encouraged this belief.) Like Alice Rumphius, Barnaby the tumbler has a kind of moral seriousness and resourcefulness about him, which makes him more reminiscent of the hardy offspring of Puritans than the innocent babes of Victorian fantasy.

The moral gravity of her child characters lends Cooney's stories an old-fashioned air. But the view of children's capacities that she embraced has come to seem rather prescient. Experiments in child psychology over the past 30 years have revealed that children are far more morally and intellectually sophisticated than many people once believed. Toddlers engage in inductive reasoning. From a very young age, children can distinguish right from wrong. Indeed, in some ways, children draw more readily on their abilities than we do on ours. They are quicker than adults, for instance, to learn and generalize from their experiences. Cooney didn't know about this research. But she came to similar conclusions on her own and wove her respect for children's minds into all her books.

The success of Chanticleer and the Fox gave Cooney a wider berth than she had had before to pursue her vision. She had always been deeply interested in folktales and fables from around the world. Publishers now associated her with that genre and offered her a regular stream of them to illustrate. During the 1960s and early '70s, she made pictures for more than a dozen books based on folktales. As she had with Chanticleer, she aimed to meticulously reconstruct each story's historical setting. She began to do research abroad. Cooney traveled extensively over several decades, including to France, Spain, Greece, North Africa, Mexico, and Oceania. She returned from each trip with notebooks full of interlaced text and images, as well as hundreds of photographs and boxes of reference books.

The '60s engrossed Cooney. She had never been overtly political, and she remained more of an observer than an active participant. What really interested her about politics was its human drama: how it revealed the "struggles" of individuals, as her daughter-in-law put it, to make their way in life. There was now a great deal of such drama to watch, even in Pepperell. Cooney eagerly followed the progress of the civil-rights movement, supported John F. Kennedy and George McGovern, and swam along with the feminist movement. She read Simone de Beauvoir, perhaps in the original French, and became more vocal about her long-held belief in women's rights.

Cooney started experimenting with new visual forms. Until the early '60s, she had worked largely in scratchboard ( a technique that involves using a stylus on a specially prepared board). Now freed from the obligation to work in cheap-to-print media, she began using colored pencils and acrylic and oil paints. Even as she shifted to different ways of illustrating, though, she retained the flatness and sharp contours that had become a hallmark of her pictures during the decades of work in scratchboard.

Ox-Cart Man (1979) © Barbara Cooney Porter.

Her new style had fully matured by the time she illustrated Ox-Cart Man, the 1979 book that won Cooney a second Caldecott Medal. The rhythmic, nearly hypnotic text by the poet Donald Hall depicts the cycle of a premodern New England family's life. It starts with the family loading a cart in the fall with goods to take to market. By the end, we are in late spring, watching the family accumulate the exact same set of goods for another year. This is a book in which, by a certain measure, nothing really happens at all.

Cooney's pictures, though period-appropriate to a tee, transform the story into a meditation on love and loss. At the center of the book, she devotes a full page to a single line of Hall's text: The farmer "sold his ox, and kissed him good-bye on his nose." Cooney shows the farmer, his hands gently embracing the ox's head and his face serious, about to put his lips to his companion's pink muzzle. The only other presences in the picture are a skeletal tree and a carpet of fallen leaves. Half a dozen pages later, though, the sprightly tail and hindquarters of an ox calf in the barn assure us that the cycle is recommencing.

Like Miss Rumphius, which appeared in print three years later, Ox-Cart Man is about change and stability, the two poles of a small child's life (and of any life). The genius of both of these books is how they use the stability of cycles to steady the destabilizing reality of change. A cycle, whether of seasons or generations, is after all just a form of change that promises continuity and return. The loneliness of Alice Rumphius and the passing of the years on the farm are subsumed, each in turn, by the reassuring thrum of the larger rhythms of life.

M iss Rumphius and Ox-Cart Man both appeared as the conservative movement's triumph brought a close to liberalism's long postwar reign. Ronald Reagan and the movement's other storytellers fueled their assault on the liberal consensus with a vivid and nostalgic retelling of the national past, celebrating cultural homogeneity, hierarchy, and an up-by-the-bootstraps ethos of success. It is surely no coincidence that just as this narrative spread, Cooney, an avowed liberal, began for the first time in her long career to create her own American myth. In a string of books that are among her finest, including three that she wrote and illustrated- Island Boy (1988), Hattie and the Wild Waves (1990), and Eleanor (1996)-she sketched an alternative vision of the American past.

Cooney's books from these years set one of her habitual outsider figures-immigrants, loners, people guided by an inner light-at the center of an unmistakably American story. Island Boy, which echoes Miss Rumphius at several points, tells the story of Matthais Tibbetts, a boy living off the Maine coast in the 19th century. Hattie is a lightly fictionalized biography of Cooney's mother and her upbringing in turn-of-the-century immigrant Brooklyn. Eleanor is the story of Eleanor Roosevelt's childhood. Each protagonist's life offers a counterpoint to the Reaganite fantasy: an American history built on moral precocity, empathy, and an abiding concern for others.

Matthais and Hattie share the self-awareness of Alice Rumphius. Like her, both declare their intentions for the future at a young age. Little Matthais longs to be useful around the farm, in spite of his older brothers' scornful dismissal. Hattie announces to her skeptical family her plan to become a painter. They share Alice's occasional lonesomeness, too. On the second page of Island Boy, baby Matthais is already alone, sleeping apart from his many brothers and sisters. And when his brothers give him the brush-off, he goes to sit by himself "under the red astrakhan apple tree" beneath which, many pages later, he will be buried. An "island boy" indeed.

Island Boy (1988) © Barbara Cooney Porter.

The child protagonists of these three books have an extraordinary empathy for other outcasts and strangers. Eleanor always thinks about "people less fortunate-about the newsboys and the people of Hell's Kitchen." The boy Matthais, in perhaps the most affecting passage of a moving book, adopts a baby seagull he finds orphaned on the "Egg Rock." He cares for it, feeding it seafood and "pie and doughnuts," and the little bird follows him everywhere. Eventually he teaches it to fly and sends it "home." Matthais's empathy helps make him into something of a feminist avant la lettre. When he and his wife, Hannah, return to the island and have three girls, his brothers again scoff-"A farmer needs sons for the heavy work"-but Matthais ignores them. "Women and girls can work mighty hard too," says Hannah, and her husband seems to agree.

In Eleanor, completed just a few years before her death in 2000, Cooney made her most insistent statement about the attributes that make a great American. The book took shape while Cooney was working on a never-completed project that was to be the story of a male artist's childhood. Like most of Cooney's protagonists, Eleanor is lonely. Unlike most of them, she has her isolation thrust on her by others. "From the beginning," the book opens with a punch, "the baby was a disappointment to her mother." (Who but Cooney would dare begin a book for children with such dark words?) Things immediately go from bad to worse. Little Eleanor is spurned by much of her family and orphaned at the age of 9. But though she is shy and awkward, she shows glints of that steely Cooney steadiness; she always tries to be brave.

Eleanor (1996) © Barbara Cooney Porter.

Eleanor's luck finally starts to turn when she goes away at 15 to boarding school in England. With the help of the school's headmistress, the "sad young girl" soon finds her footing. She discovers her strengths, learns to "think for herself," and in short order becomes a mentor to other "lonely girls." She returns home to America "poised and confident, brave, loyal, and true." The book's epilogue, which telegraphically recaps her later life, concludes with Adlai Stevenson's eulogy to the United Nations General Assembly: "She would rather light candles than curse the darkness." The line never fails to leave me with tears starting in my eyes.

Like so much of Cooney's work, these late books have an oddly timely quality. What it means to be an American is in question now as much as it was several decades ago, when they first appeared in print. The civic virtues that they model are no less under threat. To read Island Boy or Eleanor, or even Miss Rumphius, today is to encounter a vision of America as a nation shaped by those who are on the outside, the oddballs and the introverts. These are the people, Cooney suggests, who know themselves and their minds and who have the steady self-knowledge to build a society. These books, these characters, offer an idealized reflection of an America that could be, a country whose culture values empathy and patience-two qualities that seem now to be in short supply.

Children born today will face no small amount of uncertainty as the future unfolds. Cooney's characters, by exhibiting the virtues of foresight and moral courage, might be able to help. I can well imagine a child today sitting on a grandparent's knee, just as Alice Rumphius did, and declaring an intention to make the world better. Cooney would certainly have wanted that. For her, as she said in her 1980 Caldecott Medal acceptance speech, the point was not to make "picture books for children." The point was to make them "for people."

My daughter, I have to admit, is getting a bit too old for Barbara Cooney's books. The excitement Suzanne used to feel in hearing them over and over has dimmed. When she sees them on my desk now, she jokes that they are my books. I feel a little sad about that. But in a funny way, Cooney predicted that this would happen and so robbed the moment of its sting. Life and time, in her world, always move in circles. And so in Suzanne's loss of interest, I can already begin to see the turning of the wheel: the first increment in the long rotation by which she will go from the child, listening with rapt attention, to the adult who will read them to a daughter or son of her own.
*Opening illustration credits: Ox-Cart Man (1979), Miss Rumphius (1982), Island Boy (1988), Hattie and the Wild Waves (1990), Eleanor (1996). Illustrations © Barbara Cooney Porter. Used with the permission of Viking Children's Books.

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Nineteen fifty-nine was a year of soft amusements for children. Dr. Seuss's zany Happy Birthday to You! arrived in bookstores and Mattel introduced Americans to the Barbie doll and her frozen plastic gaze. On TV, suburban comedies like Father Knows Best and Dennis the Menace administered doses of mild humor laced with bland moral guidance.

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Born August 6, 1917, Barbara Cooney and her twin brother were delivered in a hotel room in New York City. The twins grew up there, the children of a stockbroker father and an artist mother, who enc...

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Barbara was a cultured author, she dedicated her time to learning about other cultures in hopes to improve her storytelling. She won a ranking in the Women's peace corps of second lieutenant. Her style of writing often included folk stories, and stories of cultures. She chose many folk stories to illustrate. Her goal was to provide the children with a vast array of books, even if many of them were not understood at first.

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Book Review of Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney

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Barbara Cooney came late to center stage, after decades as an illustrator admired for her graphic arts skills. But that particular accolade carried an implication, justified or not, of limitation. To succeed in a changing market, to satisfy her own ambitions, Cooney had to transform herself into a different kind of artist - a colorist and painter.

For Cooney, it was the work of a lifetime that began auspiciously in Brooklyn in 1917. Father was a stockbroker with New England roots. Mother was an amateur painter from a prominent German-American family of art and music patrons; she was proudest, however, of the forebear who painted oils-by-the-yard and cigar store Indians. Summers Cooney spent with her paternal grandmother on the Maine coast, the start of another lifelong allegiance. In due course she went to boarding school, then to Smith College. Though she had always drawn, it didn't occur to her to go to art school - a matter sometimes of regret, sometimes of pride - but apparently she never considered being anything but a children's book illustrator. "The answer is that I love stories."

Between 1940 and 1943 she illustrated three books, to some small effect, and wrote three of her own, to less effect. Then, after a brief wartime stint in the Women's Army Corps (WACs), she entered upon a progression common to women of her generation: twenty busy years of "getting married and having children" (two marriages, four children), of "staying home and taking care of my family" - and, in Cooney's case, "decorating books."

From the mid-1940s through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, there were very few years when she didn't illustrate at least two or three books; in 1952 her name was on six. Many she did for money, not for love: all those younglings to educate. But the 1952 batch included two by Margaret Wise Brown, Where Have You Been? and Christmas in the Barn (both Crowell) - and led to another warmly regarded Brown/Cooney Christmas book, The Little Fir Tree (Crowell, 1954). In Cooney's mind, children and animals were always with her, in person and on paper; and she was plagued by the thought that the number of her commissions depended on "the quality of the fur she drew." To outsiders, she was a Little Master. Just as her gentle, grave, very plain illustrations give conviction to Brown's rural New England Nativity - or rather, turn Brown's all-inclusive narrative into a New England Nativity - her crisp, animated embellishments are the making of Ruth Crawford Seeger's American Folk Songs for Children (Doubleday, 1948) and its successors.

In the 1950s and 1960s the Cooney name was synonymous with scratchboard, and, in the United States at least, she was the prime exponent of the medium most closely associated with book illustrations. This made sense: she had come into children's books as a black-and-white artist in order to illustrate, decorate, do a job - not, like a painter or designer or cartoonist, to create independently. For the 1960s Horn Book series "The Artist at Work," she wrote a description of scratchboard illustration, a model of its kind, that says a good deal about Cooney herself.

Each illustrating medium has a character of its own. Like wood engraving, which it resembles in appearance, scratchboard has an affinity for the printed page. The crisp, forthright technique makes a happy marriage with the clean letters of type. The flat black-and-white surface of the drawing preserves the flat surface of the page and the unity of text and illustration. For the artist, the medium is a good disciplinarian. It allows no subterfuge, no sketchy representations, no incomplete statements. Weaknesses cannot be hidden. The results may be delicate or brutal, but they are never indecisive. In short, the artist must know how to draw and he must draw with precision, for there is a finality too in drawing on scratchboard....

For Cooney, scratchboard was a source of pride and vexation. She liked the demands it made, the results she achieved; she didn't like her work to be valued, by anyone, for "the quality of the fur." She knew it was essentially a black-and-white medium; she didn't like being told, when she asked for full, camera-separated color, that she had "no color sense." To do scratchboard illustrations in two, three, or four colors was laborious - you made the black key plate on scratchboard, then scraped or scratched the design for each additional color into a transparent overlay - but in the world of children's books, where color cost money, each additional color added to the artist's standing. For the first picture book of her own, an adaptation of "The Nun's Priest's Tale" from Chaucer, Cooney was granted five colors, at least for half the pages. Some double spreads would be in five colors, some in two colors, and some would be split - ideally, in such a way that the discrepancy would be unnoticed and the picture might actually benefit; such is the case with the barnyard scene, described below, which is the most reproduced illustration in the book. Chanticleer and the Fox, a work of craftsmanship and intelligence, won the Caldecott.

The farmyard scene that sets the stage is a Late Medieval idyll, poor as the widow and her daughters are said to be. We are charmed by the sight of the winsome little girl snuggling up to the stout, flower-wreathed old sheep that has eyes only for the flowering tip of the mullein, one of nature's least graceful creations. We take delight in the sows feeding in their thatched and planked and split-log surrounds, a vignette remindful of Thomas Bewick, the father of wood engraving. These goodies are but prelude to the fable of the vain rooster Chanticleer; the worshipful little hen, Demoiselle Partlet, too doting to believe her dream of imminent danger; and the sly fox whose appeal to Chanticleer's vanity almost succeeds as a consequence. From the tip of his comb to his taloned toes, from his proud, puffed-up breast to his sweeping tail feathers, Chanticleer is an image fit for an English inn sign. But the story only gets up off the page when Cooney is stalking the fox, or stirring up the chickens, in two colors. The multicolor pictures are too decorative and diffuse, perhaps, to be effective as dramatic vehicles.

With the success of Chanticleer, the constraints on Cooney eased. She took her family to France for the summer, the start of a twenty-year, mid-career period of foreign travel and engagement with things French, then things Spanish, things Greek. She worked at her art and, without abandoning scratchboard, tried other media. Early in the French days she did The Little Juggler (Hastings House, 1961), adapted from the legend of the juggler of Notre Dame, and illustrated it with scratchboard drawings, in one and four colors, that attest to her burgeoning sense of place. Though the color is still conventionalized, the drawing is much freer; and to Cooney's gratification the people are much more "a part of the place." She illustrated French versions of nonsense verse by Edward Lear and Eugene Field - in a new, light-and-dark technique - and she was asked to do Mother Goose in French (Crowell, 1964) in full color. It was not a good idea, for Barbara Cooney or Mother Goose: the pretty, picturesque illustrations could pass as French travel ads of the time. Cooney was not yet a painter or a colorist.

More happily met, from those restless, ambitious years, is a book of modest intention; a story that, like "Old Mother Hubbard," has tempted artists known and unknown since the first nursery books were printed: "Cock Robin." Or, in the complete form in which Cooney did it, The Courtship, Merry Marriage, and Feast of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren, to which is added the Doleful Death of Cock Robin. She had settled on Chanticleer, Cooney used to say, because she wanted to draw chickens. Songbirds are birds of another feather, true, but Cock Robin cuts a fine figure, Jenny Wren is enchanting as a blushing bride, the proceedings tap a vein of merry spoofery in Cooney, and she draws and colors with a lightness of touch she seldom exhibited elsewhere.

Mere excellence was not enough, though. To end her apprenticeship, as she put it - to come into her own, we might say - Cooney needed a major achievement in full color. The opportunity, when it came, could have been tailor-made. To illustrate Donald Hall's homespun prose-poem Ox-Cart Man, she did a set of folk art-ish paintings that gained her a second Caldecott and freed her forever from unwanted commissions and pre-separation. With the kudos also came the confidence to think of telling stories of her own. She was sixty-two.

Hall's methodical, cadenced account of a nineteenth-century New England farmer and his family through the seasons - a steady round of growth and work and going to market - draws upon Cooney's long-standing affinity for vintage Americana and her later-come ability to integrate people and places. The artwork is the new thing. Did she realize that her natural inclination toward silhouetted forms, flat planes, precise detail, and needlepoint verdure gives an appearance of folk painting? That, with Ox-Cart Man, she might be in her element: a sophisticated artist working in a naïve style? So we have, on oh-so-formal display, the family members, the family sheep, and the goods each family member has made from the sheep, ready for the farmer to take to market...where he will purchase new tools and equipment, and "two pounds of wintergreen peppermint candy," that all hands will enjoy together in a glowing fireside scene.

Many years ago I went on record as finding the landscape too immaculate, the town scenes too tidy, the whole effect more quaint and tranquil than Hall's plain words dictate. Indeed, Ox-Cart Man is the New England myth of industry, equanimity, and stability incarnate, and people love it for just that reason.

After Ox-Cart Man, Cooney might have coasted along as the newest New England icon. But that wasn't enough, either. She continued to accept commissions, selectively, and especially welcomed the chance to go to new places and learn new things. To illustrate John Bierhorst's Spirit Child, a Mexican story of the Nativity (Morrow, 1984), she went to Mexico; for Louhi, Witch of North Farm, a Finnish tale retold by Toni de Gerez (Viking, 1986), she was off to Finland. But mainly she wrote and illustrated Miss Rumphius and the two other highly personal books, Island Boy and Hattie and the Wild Waves, that she referred to collectively as "my trilogy."

The wonder is that it took this born storyteller and fine writer - see her Caldecott acceptance papers, the scratchboard piece - forty years of illustrating other people's stories before she was ready to put words to paper again. She lacked confidence, she said. But it may also have helped that she was back in the Maine of her childhood at a time in life when looking backward comes naturally. It was a time in American life, too, when the urge toward personal retrospection was strong; Ox-Cart Man had its source in family legend. There is also the woman factor: the two dominant books in the trilogy are both about determined, creative women, like Cooney herself.

Potentially, Miss Rumphius is a snooze and a sermon - the long, undramatic life of a spinster librarian who, in her last years, makes the world beautiful by scattering lupine seeds. As Cooney pictures her - in words and in pictures - she's Katharine Hepburn without attitude. The words are as good as the pictures. Little Alice Rumphius (who has a corolla of red hair) sits on the knee of her beloved painter grandfather in her sailor suit; when she grows up, she tells him, she too will go to faraway places and live by the sea. She must do a third thing, he says, she must make the world more beautiful; and she agrees, not knowing what that might be. "In the meantime Alice got up and washed her face and ate porridge for breakfast. She went to school and came home and did her homework." New paragraph: "And pretty soon she was grown up."

The narrator is a child, elderly Miss Rumphius's great-niece, telling the story - partly as her great-aunt has told it to her, partly in her own droll way - to other children. The text is pithy, exquisitely paced, and consistently interesting. In composition and execution, the pictures are a leap and a bound beyond their counterparts in Ox-Cart Man. We are not looking at a scene, we are on the scene; Cooney has raised the sightline and let the forms bleed off the page. She has learned to draw architecture, like the Old Masters, to create multiple settings and points of interest. Her silhouetted forms have substance; her interior has light and air. She has achieved complexity without losing focus. The fashionable lady in the lower stacks, the two children on the heavenly second level, the tot in the nook beyond - all these claim interest, along with the newspaper reader, the trim young miss and her pug, the revolving bookstand, the stuffed animals...while only reinforcing the centrality of Miss Rumphius, in the picture and the library.

Her exotic, far-flung travel is complete in two magic Movieland scenes, with accompanying vignettes, that are at once spare and suggestive. There's wit, too, in Miss Rumphius atop the mountain encouraging her male companion below - and then, on the opposite page, hurting her back getting off a camel. It's time, maybe, to find her place by the sea.

The pages flow. The clean, spacious design - a collaboration between Cooney and Viking art director Barbara Hennessy - allows each small figure its gesture, then carries the eye onward. In full color, artist and designer have achieved the happy union with paper that was once the preserve of scratchboard and other linear techniques - a union more easily achieved, in paint, with transparent washes. Cooney, working in acrylic, had to adapt.

When Miss Rumphius is settled in her house by the sea, the picture expands onto the facing page, like the opening picture of the harbor her grandfather sailed into. And when she has become That Crazy Old Lady who scatters lupine seeds to the winds, we have a double-page spread - in the breezy spirit of a bygone New Yorker cover - that positions the reader along a lupine-lined lane to watch her approach.

Island Boy (Viking, 1988), the second book in Cooney's trilogy, tells of a Maine family resolved to remain on their island, generation after generation, and hold off summer "rusticators." It's a slight, predictable work borne along by sincerity. Hattie and the Wild Waves (Viking, 1990), based on the childhood of Cooney's mother, has a great deal of substance: it's set firmly in the turn-of-the-century household of a prosperous, refined German-American family where Hattie and her brother and sister have a full life upstairs and downstairs at holiday celebrations and during summers at the seashore. It's at the shore that Hattie, the family picture-maker, is inspired to become a painter; she persists through the society marriage of her sister, the business success of her brother, winters at the downtown Brooklyn hotel he builds (the historic Bossert), evenings of going to the opera with Mama and Papa - until, hearing a young performer "[sing] her heart out," she takes the plunge and enters art school. The pictures are some of Cooney's loosest and freshest: the scene of the children playing cards with the servants below-stairs has the rugged expressiveness of a genre painting; the scene aboard Papa's "beautiful boat" gives a new, dramatic thrust to Cooney's penchant for parallels. But Hattie and the Wild Waves remains family history pointed up, and social history by the by, where Miss Rumphius is legend.

Together the two books launched a new subgenre of pictorial life-portraits suited to "different" women and other out-of-the-way figures. Cooney herself wrote and illustrated a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor (Viking, 1996) and illustrated a book about Emily Dickinson conceived in a Cooney-esque way, Michael Bedard's Emily (Doubleday, 1992). The last book she illustrated, Mary Lyn Ray's true-to-life story of a family of basket-weaving backcountry outcasts, Basket Moon (Little, Brown, 1999), is a departure for Cooney in subject and treatment - a somber tale with a violent, transforming climax.

Barbara Cooney died in March 2000, working away as if she would indeed, as she once said, live to be a hundred.

* * *

Barbara Cooney was almost uniquely a librarians' illustrator. For the greater part of her career she illustrated quietly disarming books - like Lee Kingman's The Best Christmas and Peter's Long Walk - that lived full, rich lives in school and public libraries; and for the most part it was librarians (along with fellow artists) who admired and appreciated her work. Consciously or not, she gave back their love - our love - with Miss Rumphius. The child who grows up enterprising, adventurous, and romantic becomes a world-traveling librarian. Then, retired to her seaside cottage, she watches as the local children gather up lupines, her wild lupines, by the armful. To a children's librarian, that's a job description.

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Barbara Cooney came late to center stage, after decades as an illustrator admired for her graphic arts skills. But that particular accolade carried an implication, justified or not, of limitation. To succeed in a changing market, to satisfy her own ambitions, Cooney had to transform herself into a different kind of artist - a colorist and painter.

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Christmas (scratchboard)
Barbara Cooney, illustrator, author
New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1967

Barbara Cooney graduated from Smith College in 1938 and studied lithography and etching at the Art Students League in New York. She won the Caldecott Medal for illustration twice, in 1958 for Chanticleer and the Fox with a full color scratchboard technique which she had been using for roughly twenty years, and in 1980 for Donald Hall's Ox-Cart Man, crafted in a distinctive primitive folk art style.

Each prize changed the artistic course of her career. After the first Caldecott she began to paint, and after the second she began to write her own stories to illustrate, including what she retrospectively called a trilogy: Miss Rumphius (1982), Island Boy (1988) and Hattie and the Wild Waves (1990). They made up what she said was ''as close to any autobiography as I will ever get.''

In 1989 the Maine Library Association created the Lupine Award to honor outstanding children's books by state residents or authors of books about Maine, beginning with Cooney, and in 1996 she was proclaimed a Living Treasure of the State of Maine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/15/books/barbara-cooney-83-children-s-book-creator.html?_r=0
"Barbara Cooney (1917-)." Something About the Author, edited by Alan Hedblad, vol. 96, Gale, 1998, pp. 67-75. Something About the Author, login.ezproxy.lib.umn.edu/login?url=http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=SATA&sw=w&u=umn_wilson&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CVUEBWH657563315&it=r. Accessed 5 Dec. 2016.

Gale Document Number:GALE|VUEBWH657563315

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Christmas (scratchboard)Barbara Cooney, illustrator, authorNew York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1967 Barbara Cooney graduated from Smith College in 1938 and studied lithography and etching at the Art Students League in New York.