Tasha Tudor

Jun 25 2008 Liverpool Daily Post

SHOWING country life at its most peaceful and idyllic, her pictures in such English classics as The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows, delighted children and adults alike while her own lifestyle came, she said, from "nostalgia for a day and time that was more peaceful and slow”.

American author and illustrator Tasha Tudor, who has died, aged 92, provided just the kind of escapism that British and American readers were looking for during the dark years of war.

Born Starling Burgess in Boston to an inventor father and painter mother, she later changed her name to Tasha Tudor and began writing children’s books while studying at the Boston Museum Fine Arts School. Her first, Pumpkin Moonshine, was published in 1938, to excellent reviews. That same year, she married Thomas McReady and moved with him to her mother’s farm, where they farmed cows, geese, ducks and hens.

However, Tasha yearned for an even more remote life, so she and her husband moved to a quaint 1740s New Hampshire farmhouse. Here, without water or electricity, she brought up four children and began writing and illustrating more children’s books.

Some of her most popular works were produced around this period, including Alexander the Gander (1939) and Mother Goose (1944). Along with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, she also illustrated many well known English children’s nursery rhymes and books.

In 1941, the New York Times said her pictures: “Have the same fragile beauty of early spring evenings".

In 1961, Tasha divorced, and moved to Vermont, where her son, Seth, built her a 19th-century New England farm house. There she lived a simple lifestyle reminiscent of the 1830s, spinning and weaving flax into cloth, sewing her own old-fashioned dresses, cooking on a wood-burning stove, milking goats and hand-dipping candles to light her rooms. She would spend hours working barefoot in her vegetable and flower gardens, and peacefully working on illustrations for current projects. She also ran a small, independent arts and publishing business that sustained the family.

Tasha’s art showed a world full of beauty and imagination and people continue to be drawn to the sense of innocence and nostalgia depicted in her work.

She is survived by her children and her grandchildren.

Tasha Tudor, children’s author and illustrator; born August 28, 1915, died June 18, 2008