“WILLA” ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATION BY AMERICAN CHILDREN’S BOOK ILLUSTRATOR AND DESIGNER LEONARD WEISGARD (1916-2000) 

This illustration, of a young girl on horseback galloping past sunflowers that are featured in the foreground, is an original work by the artist Leonard Weisgard, the award-winning illustrator of more than 300 children’s books. 

The illustration is unsigned, created circa 1957-1958. It is titled in pencil by the artist on the verso “Willa”. This is a detailed preliminary design for the dust jacket of the book titled “WILLA, The Story of Willa Cather’s Growing Up” by the author Ruth Franchere, published by Thomas Y. Crowell, New York in 1958. 

The illustration is a mixed media of stenciling and gouache painted to the edges on illustration board. The illustration measures 17 x 24 1/2 inches. The illustration comes unframed.

The photo of the book “Willa” shows the artist’s final design of the illustration used for the printed cover. PLEASE NOTE: The book is not available and does not come with the purchase of this illustration.

CONDITION: The illustration is in excellent condition, with no evidence of any damage to the image. 

Leonard Weisgard was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1916 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 studied 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 the Avant-Garde French illustrators of children's books of the 1920s.

Weisgard 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 also wrote books he illustrated himself, sometimes under the pseudonym Adam Green. 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 married Phyllis Monnot in 1951. He and his wife often worked together creating set and costume design. He would do the sketches and Phyllis would make the 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."

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

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