Leonard Weisgard

"Biography from the Archives of askART

The following, submitted January 2005, is contributed by the children of the artist: Abigail, Ethan and Chrissy Weisgard.

Leonard Weisgard, Caldecott award-winning illustrator of more than 300 children's books, was perhaps best known for his collaboration with the author Margaret Wise Brown. Weisgard was born in New Haven, Connecticut but spent much of his early childhood in England, the birth place of his father.

His interest in the quality of children's books began after his family moved back to the USA when he was eight years old. As a schoolboy in New York, he was dissatisfied with the books supplied by the public schools he attended. He found the illustrations monotonous and thought that the world "could not be all that dreary and limited to only one color."

He went on to study art at the Pratt Institute and the New School for Social Research, where he was influenced by primitive cave paintings, Gothic and Renaissance art and avant-garde French illustrators of children's books of the 1920s. He used a wide range of colors and media in his books, including gouache, poster paint, crayon, chalk, decoupage, stenciling and pen and ink.

Leonard Weisgard also studied dance with Martha Graham and worked in the field of window display. He began his career making illustrations for magazines such as Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar. His first book, "Suki, the Siamese Pussy," was published in 1937, followed by an adaptation of Cinderella. In 1939 the first of more than two dozen collaborations with Margaret Wise Brown was published, "The Noisy Book." Their 1947 book, "The Little Island," which Brown wrote under the pseudonym Golden MacDonald, won the Caldecott Medal for best-illustrated children's book. Weisgard also collaborated with other children's book writers and wrote books he illustrated himself, sometimes under the pseudonym "Adam Green."

Leonard Weisgard married Phyllis Monnot in 1951, and they had three children, Abigail (1952), Christina (1954) and Ethan (1957). He and his wife often worked together creating set and costume design Leonard sketching, Phyllis making patterns so the designs could become a reality. He designed the stage sets and costumes for several productions of the San Francisco Ballet, including "The Dryad" and "The Nutcracker."

Leonard Weisgard moved to Denmark with his wife and children in 1969 where he lived for the rest of his life. Books, he once said in an interview, "have always, for as long as I can recall, been a source of real magic in this wildly confusing world."

(Sources: The LA Times from the 24th of January, 2000 and The New York Times the 27th of January, 2000) " Accessed from Askart.com on 1/18/18