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WHEN IN 1943 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published his slim fable The Little Prince, one reviewer described its effect in a remarkable and prescient way. The book, wrote the critic, “will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam. It will strike them in some place that is not the mind and glow there until the time comes for them to comprehend it.” The reviewer was P. L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, who knew a thing or two about symbolism and submerged emotion.
The phenomenon that Travers described is, in some respects, the source of the reverberating magic of the best children’s literature. When we are adults, we can look back at the books we loved in childhood and can remember the illustrations or stories (or paragraphs in stories) that meant something to us, even if we can’t quite recapitulate the intensity of our first response. But why it mattered at the time? That is the mystery. As the great Robert Lawson once observed, “No one can possibly tell what tiny detail of a drawing or what seemingly trivial phrase in a story will be the spark that sets off a great flash in the mind of some child, a flash that will leave a glow there until the day he dies.”
It’s true. We can’t know when the flash might happen, or what will strike a spark from the flint, but we can encourage this incendiary process by making deliberate, adventurous, and sophisticated choices in the books we share with children.
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ONCE UPON A time, a child might have to wait until high school to encounter classics of adult literature and masterpieces of fine art. Inexpensive board books now make it possible to bring these titles and pictures into the nursery, to be chewed upon by babies and hopefully absorbed in other ways, too. Jennifer Adams’s BabyLit books, illustrated by Alison Oliver, use the titles and characters of great novels as starting points to teach colors, categories, and other concepts. For the Cozy Classics series, Holman Wang and Jack Wang hew much closer to the original stories, dramatically condensing novels such as War and Peace, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Les Misérables, and illustrating them with photographed tableaux of soft felted figurines. The hope is that children will develop such warm, positive associations with these classic titles that they’ll want to pick up the unabridged novels when they’re older.
I met Jack Wang at a café near Ithaca College in upstate New York, where he teaches English. “We think the problem is that these classics have become overly academic,” he said, “and people only see them in overly studied terms, and they’ve become intimidated by them. They’re afraid to enjoy them as stories, which is what they are, first and foremost, right? Really compelling stories that have lasted because they told a great narrative.”
In the Cozy Classics, great narrative is condensed to a comical degree. The text of the Wang brothers’ version of Moby-Dick, for instance, reads in full: Sailor, Boat, Captain, Leg, Mad, Sail, Find, Whale, Chase, Smash, Sink, Float. This leaves out a good deal—206,040 words, to be exact—but does convey the gist and some of the drama, if not the humor, of Melville’s original.
“The thing is, these stories belong to everyone,” Wang pointed out. “It’s not just the Western canon, per se, but everyone can feel a sense of ownership over these classics because these are great human stories. I want my kids to be close to these stories because it’s part of their cultural inheritance too.”
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CULTURE DOES NOT consist solely of art and writing, of course, but also of attitudes, practices, and values. The things we say when we’re talking to children about stories and pictures, the emphases we make and the bits we skip over, tell them something about how we see the world. A wordless picture book gave researchers at New York University a fascinating look at the way parents can impart distinct cultural norms when they’re reading with children. For the 2015 study, clinicians video-recorded Dominican, Mexican, and African American mothers sharing Mercer Mayer’s book Frog, Where Are You? with their young children. Building on similar observations of white, Latino, and Chinese mothers, the clinicians could compare how parents of different backgrounds infused the story with their own priorities.
“We found that the mothers constructed different stories, and those stories aligned with their expectations, and their emphases on what’s important to know and to learn,” Catherine Tamis-LeMonda told me. “The Chinese moms tended, when they read books or told stories, to talk a lot about the moral lesson, the social rules, and what you should do or not do. They would say things like: ‘Oh, the boy touched the beehive! He shouldn’t have done that. They can come out and hurt him, you don’t do that!’ They were using the story as a way to enforce rules and obligations. The Latinos were using the book to talk more about emotions and how people felt. And the African Americans were using the book to talk about goals, and how hard the boy has to work to find the frog, and persist in finding the frog, which put an emphasis on individual persistence and working hard.”
No child is an island, to paraphrase John Donne. Children come from families. They are the newest braids in that cord of humanity, and it is right and beautiful that they should know something of what their parents and grandparents value, while at the same time having access to the classic works of human imagination that we all own in common.
Contemporary culture will take care of itself. It’s lively and loud, and most children’s lives are full of it. Electronic media will keep them up-to-date. When parents read long-beloved classics with them, and share stories that help us convey what we want them to know about the world, we can help them discover powerful narratives and pictures they will never find on PBS Kids or Instagram.
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“THE IMAGES OF things impress themselves in our minds,” said the Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti. And who can doubt it? What we look at determines what we see, and what we see—really see—becomes part of an inner museum of pictures and references, a mental collection that for most of us is not so much curated as acquired in a haphazard way.
There is an opportunity, with children, to show them art and illustration that will furnish their minds with beauty and mystery, symmetry and wonder. The simplest mechanism for this is the selection of picture books that we share with them. The beauty they find may be sweet and domestic, like the scene of little Peter’s hot bath after his adventures in The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats, or the rabbit father tucking his children into a stack of four bunk beds in Richard Scarry’s illustrations for The Bunny Book, by Patsy Scarry. It may be elegant and dramatic, like Walter Crane’s sumptuous princesses and Arthur Rackham’s dreamlike ogres. These last come to us from a period known as the Golden Age of Illustration, which ran from the late nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth century and marked a kind of late-blooming, secondary renaissance involving artwork and graphic design for books and magazines. It is the era that brought us Kate Greenaway’s graceful country girls, John Tenniel’s sharp, alarming caricatures, and the rich, realistic paintings of Howard Pyle, Jessie Willcox Smith, and N. C. Wyeth, whose portraits of ruddy, ruthless pirates for Treasure Island will, for many devotees, forever represent the “gentlemen of fortune” described by Robert Louis Stevenson.
A little later, in the midcentury afterglow of the Golden Age, all manner of other extraordinary artists turned their talents to making pictures for children’s books: Eloise Wilkin, with her round-cheeked innocents; Garth Williams, master of soft, evocative charcoal drawings; and Gustaf Tenggren, whose wild, wonky lines and colors brought to life the Tawny, Scrawny Lion, and many other characters. This was the heyday of the incomparable Margaret Wise Brown, who was herself not an illustrator but whose writing created opportunities for Clement Hurd, with his color-saturated pictures, and the blocky brilliance of Leonard Weisgard.
I mention these nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustrators because although the official Golden Age may have ended, their work is still with us. We and our children are fortunate: we have access to the best of the past and to the best that’s being created today. You might say we are enjoying a new Golden Age,
one informed as much by those earlier artists as by the scraggly energy of contemporary illustrators like Quentin Blake, Matthew Cordell, and Lauren Child; by the chilly genius of Chris Van Allsburg and Jon Klassen; by the vibrant colors of Christian Robinson, Ana Castillo, and Raúl Colón; by the observant lines of Erin Stead, Brian Floca, and Barbara McClintock; and by the joyful watercolors of Suzy Lee, Jerry Pinkney, Chris Raschka, Meilo So, and Helen Oxenbury.
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the eye itself can be coaxed, informed, and persuaded. Like the mothers in the NYU study who each brought her own cultural understanding to a wordless book, we too can use the time we spend with children showing them what we think beautiful. We can also make it clear to them that fine paintings and sculpture—like poetry and novels—are not remote, forbidding objects that belong to the adult world, but sophisticated expressions of human creativity that belong to them, too.
“Making a connection to art is huge. When children have seen a painting at home, and then they see it in person, it becomes theirs,” said Amy Guglielmo, a writer and artist who with Julie Appel created a board-book series called Touch the Art. Guglielmo was teaching kindergarten, using lots of artwork in her lessons, and took her class one day to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Everything was fine until the children got to a particular gallery. “One of them recognized Picasso’s Three Musicians,” Guglielmo told me, “and he touched it.”
There was a rebuke from the museum guards—never a nice experience—but the child’s desire to make physical contact with a familiar picture was an inspiration. Guglielmo and Appel went on to create books featuring artwork from a wide range of periods and styles with each page, and each piece, having its own embedded tactile element. In the Touch the Art books, children can stroke the fur of Albrecht Dürer’s hare, fiddle with the edge of a real tablecloth in Romare Bearden’s Autumn of the Rooster, or tug the tutu of a Degas ballerina.
It is hard not to touch the art, to be honest, whatever your age. A moment ago, my daughter Phoebe came in to my office and saw a copy of one of the books, Brush Mona Lisa’s Hair, on my desk. “I love that one!” she cried, and, as she had when she was little, ran her fingers though a tangle of Mona Lisa’s hair, stroked the yarn tail of a Velázquez horse, pinged the golden elastic around the hair of Botticelli’s Venus, and toyed with the gilded lace standing out from the collar of a rakish fellow in a portrait by Frans Hals.
“Do you still want to marry him, Mom?” Phoebe smirked, with a teenager’s annoying steel-trap memory. (Years ago, I had confessed to having a crush on The Laughing Cavalier.) She didn’t wait for an answer, but flipped on, running her finger along the fur on the groom’s robe in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, touching the felt hatband and raised diamond necklace of Piero della Francesca’s double portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and his wife, Battista Sforza, tapping a pearl earring in the famous Vermeer portrait, and hunting for the pop-up window that reveals a secret ace of diamonds in Georges de la Tour’s The Card-Sharp. She didn’t bother with the final picture, a detail of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, because time and use had shorn the two cherubim of their fluffy, claret-colored feathers.
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested,” Francis Bacon famously said. We think this pronouncement had to do with the quality (or not) of the contents of books. But perhaps he simply anticipated the mass availability of durable fine-art editions for the very young. Such readers are inclined to gnaw.
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PICTURE BOOKS ARE an entry point to art and illustration. They can also widen a child’s aesthetic horizons. That’s the explicit purpose of books for children that explore art history, which tend to start with prehistoric cave paintings and end, usually, with modern Abstract Expressionism. Claire d’Harcourt’s Art Up Close and Lucy Micklethwait’s A Child’s Book of Art: Great Pictures, First Words are good examples of the type. But a book needn’t be about art to inculcate a taste for art. Through storybooks, children can come to appreciate different styles and traditions in an easy, natural way. For instance, anyone paging through the picture books of Chen Jiang Hong, which include The Magic Horse of Han Gan and Little Eagle, can’t help but absorb the colors and brushwork of classical Chinese painting. The filigreed delicacy of Mughal and Persian miniatures comes through in books such as Diane Stanley’s Fortune (last seen in Laura Amy Schlitz’s library class), One Grain of Rice, by Demi, and (a huge favorite with my children) The Seven Wise Princesses, retold by Wafa’ Tarnowska and illustrated by Nilesh Mistry. The exuberant colors and thick lines of Australian Aboriginal art fill Bronwyn Bancroft’s books, among them Kangaroo and Crocodile: My Big Book of Australian Animals.
To me, the object here is not to instruct or demand—“You will look at these pictures and you will like them”—but in a gentle way to introduce, familiarize, and inspirit. A child gazing at the fat babies, rich fabrics, and moonlit grottoes in Maurice Sendak’s strange and stirring picture book Outside Over There may not know that he is absorbing something of the German Romantic style—but he is. The same is true when children explore Paul O. Zelinsky’s paintings for Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin, and enter the ocher landscapes and classical interiors of the Italian Renaissance.
I talked to Zelinsky about his work. He was in college when he fell in love with the period, and he told me, “With Rapunzel, I was definitely showing children what I love about Italian Renaissance art. I started painting actual poses from Renaissance paintings and using them. It started with the cover, which was taken from a Rembrandt. I asked myself: Is this cheating? What is my purpose in doing this?”
The answer, like the inspiration, came from the past. “In the Renaissance, that’s what painters did,” Zelinsky said. “There was no expectation of everything being original. It was more the opposite. Every pose was a reference to something else. If you were educated, you knew about what was being dug up,” he said, referring to the discoveries of buried Greek and Roman antiquities that sparked the classical renewal. As with fairy tales and nursery rhymes, each cultural reference could rely on a layer of previous understanding.
“Everybody is formed by what they’re exposed to,” Zelinsky concluded, “and if you have rich visual experiences that have meaning as a kid, how could that not feed into your ability to see and think and feel?”
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FOR THE ILLUSTRATOR David Wiesner, creator of wordless picture books such as Mr. Wuffles!, Art & Max, and Flotsam, the sparks that set off great flashes came when he was a boy poring over art books at his local library in New Jersey. Wiesner found himself drawn to the subtle, intricate backgrounds of Renaissance paintings: “Look at that landscape behind Mona Lisa,” he told an interviewer for a retrospective of his work, David Wiesner and the Art of Wordless Storytelling.
I suspect that Da Vinci made that up. It looks to me like Mars or some alien place—the tiny roads, the cliffs and arches; it’s fascinating.
I always loved Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow for similar reasons. Your eye can move from the figures in the foreground, down the hill, into the town, passing all the people as they play and work until you reach the distant background. All of this is rendered with total clarity. As a kid I felt as if I was being pulled into the picture. It was full of stories.
These early encounters have a way of abiding. Growing up in an evangelical household in Florida, the writer and editor Christine Rosen was shocked and mesmerized by a reproduction she saw in a book, of David with the head of Goliath painted on a fifteenth-century Florentine shield. “It was a story I knew very well from Bible school,” she told me, “it was this bloodied head of Goliath at the feet of David, and having known the story I expected to see this victorious expression. But David’s not looking victorious—he looks sort of alarmed. Like he’s just felled a giant with a rock! I remember connecting to that. It was this visualization of a Bible story I knew by heart and—it just struck me. It’s not, you know, the Venus de Milo, and it’
s not even a particularly well-known piece of art, but it just connected.”
I had the same sort of experience myself. As a latchkey child in rural upstate New York and, later, in rural Maine, I used to study Heinrich Hoffman’s dainty, grisly illustrations in Struwwelpeter, his 1845 collection of cautionary tales that were meant to lampoon the beetle-browed moralizers of the era, but which I took to be in earnest. I was fascinated by the incongruity of Hoffman’s airy, delicate paintings and the horrors that befall the children in them. A disobedient girl plays with matches and reduces herself to a little smoking heap of ashes. A naughty thumb-sucker gets his digits lopped off by a long-legged assailant with sharp scissors. The pictures are appalling, and I couldn’t look away. Like David Wiesner, I also got hold of a book of paintings by Bruegel the Elder. I scrutinized the crowded scenes of peasants roistering at wedding parties, and resting their scythes beneath shocks of wheat, and traversing the snow under bleak Low Country winter skies. It seems clear to me now, and perhaps it was clear even at the time, that studying these pictures had the effect of throwing a set of switches in my head. The time I spent with them altered how the world would look to me. Somehow, even when the figures were grotesque, they opened my way to seeing beauty.
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“IS IT NOT the case that what makes your heart knock with fright or delight also makes your brain go tick?” This question, posed by art historian Jane Doonan, gets to the heart of the way that images can affect us. “The sensual pleasure to be derived from pictures is not something apart,” she says, “but has a special role in the making of pictorial meaning.”
To engage in the process of making “pictorial meaning” doesn’t require a lot of time but it demands a quiet time. If we are to help children develop their aesthetic senses to the full, so that they can explore and be sensitive to the range of emotions and ideas that picture books awaken in them, we need to protect the space in which this can happen. David Wiesner, Christine Rosen, Paul Zelinsky, and I all had the luxury of making personal connections to art and imagery in an epoch before the Internet. Finding the time for that transformation is more difficult now. Life is busier, and it’s harder to settle the mind. Yet the human capacity for appreciating deep and lovely things remains, and so this time is worth finding, and the effort worth making.
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