My Retro Reads: "Andersen's Fairy Tales" by Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Leonard Weisgard, 1954

LEONARD WEISGARD (1916 - 2000) Leonard Weisgard was a Caldecott award-winning illustrator of more than 200 children’s books and 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, where his father originally came from. His interest in the quality of children’s books began after his family moved back to the USA when he was 8. 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.

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, and his first collaboration with Brown was two years later, The Noisy Book. He won the 1948 Caldecott Medal for U.S. picture book illustration, recognizing The Little Island, written by Brown. They collaborated again on The Important Book, published by Harper & Brothers in 1949. Altogether, Weisgard illustrated at least 14 of Brown's books, including two that were published posthumously.

He used a wide range of colors and media in his books, including gouache, poster paint, crayon, chalk, decoupage, stenciling and pen and ink.