Original Pencil Landscape Child's Garden of Verses

Please note: This original is currently being prepared for sale and will show as "sold out" until the sale date. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this preview.

This detailed pencil drawing is simply exquisite. If you’ve seen this pastoral landscape  in Tasha’s 1947 illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, you’ll be surprise to see even more detail on the original. With the smallest pencil marks, Tasha’s builds a scene of bucolic peace. Two cows rest in a pasure by the brook while two large trees anchor the image. A farmhouse rests as a focal point. As you study it, you’ll see two tiny marks on the lane and realize they are people walking away from the viewer. The cattails in the foreground are so delicate and at the same time, show an artist confident in her ability to relay the world she saw.

Around 1946/7 when this pencil drawing was likely made, Tasha Tudor and her husband were fixing up their ‘new’ 1789 rambling farmhouse in Webster, New Hampshire while caring for three small children. Tasha’s third child was born in 1945, the same year the family moved from Connecticut to New Hampshire. Less than ten years after her first book was published in 1938, Tasha was working on the illustrations for A Child’s Garden of Verses, her eleventh published book. 

It’s easy to look back on Tasha’s career from our vantage point in 2025 and romanticize the trajectory of her successful career as a forgone conclusion. But in the mid-1940s, she was washing diapers by hand, cooking for her family, tending the fireplaces and cookstoves that comprised the only heat. Water was pumped by hand. The list of chores necessary for daily survival goes on and on.

One must wonder how she found the time to put pencil to page. In her later years, she was known to remark upon the pressures her young family faced. As she would say, she completed book after book after book because ‘the wolf was at the door’ and she needed to support her family. 

She kept little to no illustrations for herself, instead selling them for income. This exquisite pencil drawing was sold through her friend Ned Hill’s Dutch Inn Gift Shop in Mill Hall, Pennsylvania. This piece has been in the same family since its purchase in 1972.

This piece has been temporarily remounted within its original, faded matte. We recommend that the buyer have it professionally re-matted with a new acid-free matte and UV glass as the drawing board exposed in the matte opening shows fading. Pencil is a stable medium and remains soft and clear as originally drawn. The buyer will have an interesting time deciphering writing upon the drawing board. The text at the top right was erased and looks like Tasha’s handwriting indicated the poem this drawing was intended for. The text at the bottom left looks to be publisher notes. Yes, it’s hard to believe now, but it was common for art directors to write in the margins of original art early in Tasha’s career. 

The original backing displayed an identifying sticker likely from the Dutch Inn Gift Shop, which says “Child’s Garden of Verses p.40 Landscape pencil.” We have included this sticker in an archival plastic envelope.

Pencil

Circa 1946/47

Outer Frame size: 8 ¼” x 9 ¼”  

Matte opening size:  3” x 4 ⅝”

Original board size: 3 1/2” x 6 1/2”