Pictures by MAURICE SENDAK annotated by the illustrator, with an appreciation by Shirley Hughes

Pictures by MAURICE SENDAK 

Harper and Row 1971

Maurice Sendak in 1971 at the International Youth Library in Munich

In 1971 Harper and Row Publishers in New York produced a beautifully packaged set of prints which featured handsomely reproduced artwork from eight of Maurice Sendak's books. Nineteen prints in all, housed loosely in a large covered case. The case was decorated with a repeating pattern that Sendak used as an endpaper design for Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water. Included were prints from pen and ink drawings as well as beautiful watercolor art, all of which were specially selected and annotated by the artist.

This portfolio was a valued part of my Sendak collection and I had always planned on framing some of the prints. Unfortunately, the humidity from our riverside home got into the box before I realized it was happening and the case along with several prints were ruined.

I decided to feature the portfolio on this site as a way to preserve it for myself and as a vehicle for Sendak's own words to combine with the images he so masterfully created.

endpapers, detail, Hector Protector

Pictures by

MAURICE

SENDAK

Affection and a suitably prejudiced view of my own work bind these nineteen pictures together. They are some of the pictures I like best, selected from eight of the seventy books I have illustrated over the past twenty years. …

       The influence of Victorian artists such as George Pinwell and Arthur Hughes, to name just two, is evident in the pictures for Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967), Zlateh the Goat (1966), and A Kiss for Little Bear (1968). And I’ve learned from other English artists as well. Randolph Caldecott gave me my first demonstration of the subtle uses of rhythm and structure in a picture book. (Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water of 1965, represented here by one illustration, is an intentionally contrived homage to this beloved teacher.) For other fine points in picture-book making, I have studied the work of Beatrix Potter and William Nicholson. Nicholson’s The Pirate Twins certainly influenced Where the Wild Things Are.

       A retrospective of my English passion can be found in Lullabies and Night Songs (1965). The illustrations for this book, which skip from Rowlandson to Cruikshank to Caldecott and even to Blake, are a noisy pastiche of styles, though I believe they still resonate with my own particular sound. The three offered here are definitely favorites, despite their obvious eclecticism.

       The earliest pictures in this portfolio are from Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (1962), as far as I am aware the only book I’ve done that reveals my admiration for Winslow Homer.

       Where the Wild Things Are (1963), a favorite child, is represented by four illustrations. Besides owing much to Caldecott and Nicholson, this book must acknowledge stylistic kinship to French and German book illustration of the nineteenth century. I was thirty-five when I did Wild Things, still looking to Europe and back a hundred years for creative roots. My immediate past, everything I grew up with, though tenderly treasured in memory, was useless to me as an artist; or so I apparently believed.

       The unconscious, thank heavens, goes its own way, ignoring the mumbo-jumbo sophistries of the head up front. Wild Things, despite its European credentials, is the first book of mine in which I see a glimmer of interest in confronting and exploiting a kind of art I had known all my life. This is said with a good deal of hindsight and with the accomplishment of In the Night Kitchen (1970) behind me. That book is influenced not by an artistic mode of the past that I consider superior but by art that was very real and potent to a child growing up in America in the thirties and forties. Night Kitchen and, to a lesser degree, Wild Things reflect a popular American art both crass and oddly surrealistic, an art that encompasses the Empire State Building, syncopated Disney cartoons, and aluminum-clad, comic-book heroes, an Art Moderne whose richness of detail was most sensuously catalogued in the movies. What Caldecott is to Hector Protector, King Kong is to Wild Things. What the Victorian illustrators are to Higglety Pigglety Pop!, Busby Berkeley and Mickey Mouse are to Night Kitchen. This is oversimplification, of course, but the truth lies somewhere inside. …

                                                                                                                                                                     Maurice Sendak

    (excerpts from his annotations included in the portfolio)

April 1971



These, then, is a sampling of the illustrations included as prints in the portfolio. I have also shown the covers for the books from which the illustrations were taken.

Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (1962)

Where the Wild Things Are (1963)

Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water (1965)

Zlateh the Goat (1966)

Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967)

A Kiss for Little Bear (1968)

In the Night Kitchen (1970)

(part of the print is cut off, but it is such a good reproduction that I decided to include it in spite of the partial image,
plus it is a photgraph of the actual print as included in the portfolio,)

(this reproduction shows the gutter of the book, but is otherwise excellent)

book cover with
Caldecott Honor medal

some of the other influences mentioned:

George Pinwell  1842-1875

Hop Pickers

The Lost Child

Arthur Hughes  1832-1915

Home from the Sea

The Property Room

Randolph Caldecott   1846-1886

A Farmer Went Trotting upon his Grey Mare

Beatrix Potter   1866-1943

from The Tale of Benjamin Bunny

fungi, from her botanical drawings

William Nicholson  1872-1949  

from The Pirate Twins

Thomas Rowlandson 1756-1827

Exterior of Strawberry Hill

John Bull at the Italian Opera

George Cruikshank   1792-1878

a sudden lurch aboard an East-Indiaman

Oliver meets Fagin

William Blake   1757-1827

Winslow Homer   1836-1910

Boys and Kitten

Long Branch, New Jersey, 1869

The Empire State Building

Disney cartoons and Mickey Mouse

Steamboat Willie

Aluminum-clad, comic-book heroes

King Kong, the movie   1933

Busby Berkeley  1895-1976 

Footlight Parade 1933




_______________________________________________________

1985

Maurice Sendak: an appreciation

Like most great children's writers and illustrators, his work came from deep within – in his case somewhere very dark

by Shirley Hughes

The Observer, Saturday 12 May 2012

Maurice Sendak, who has died aged 83, was one of the great writers and illustrators of children's literature. His imagination was deeply rooted in his own vividly remembered childhood and there is a powerful dreamlike quality to his work. He was a master draftsman, largely self-taught and in some ways quite traditional, because he was inspired by Victorian English illustrators such as Randolph Caldecott and by the Jewish European folklore of his own background. But this was mixed with the heady excitement of American comic strips and, of course, the movies. I met him once over dinner and he described his intense excitement as a child at going from his home in Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge to the cinema in Manhattan to see Buster Keaton, Mickey Mouse and Laurel and Hardy, all of whom were strongly inspirational in his works.

Like most great children's story writers and illustrators, his work came from somewhere deep within, from a place that was in his case extremely dark. His childhood was overshadowed by the deaths of extended family in the concentration camps of Europe. So it is hardly surprising that the lost child, the child who is stolen away, as well as the maverick child who runs away from the stultifying strictures of adult life, were themes that Sendak returned to again and again in his work.

If you ask people what their favourite Maurice Sendak book is, they always say Where the Wild Things Are. But my personal favourite is In the Night Kitchen. It is so brilliantly scary and marvellously unsettling. Those chefs are frightening in the way that clowns and comedians can so often be. My other favourite is Outside Over There, his story of Ida, the jealous sibling whose baby sister is kidnapped by goblins through the nursery window. Again you have this theme of the lost or stolen child, so central to Sendak's work, and exerting such a deep pull for all of us.

Shirley Hughes is an author/illustrator. Her books include the Alfie series and Dogger. Her first teenage novel, Hero on a Bicycle, was recently published by Walker Books.