Leonard Weisgard; Award-Winning Book Illustrator

Leonard Weisgard, 83, Caldecott Award-winning illustrator of more than 300 children’s books known for his collaboration with author Margaret Wise Brown. Weisgard was born in Connecticut but spent much of his early childhood in England with his family. His interest in the quality of children’s books began after his family moved back to the United States 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. 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, followed by an adaptation of Cinderella. In 1939 the first of more than two dozen collaborations with 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, who moved to Denmark in 1969, used a wide range of colors and media in his books, including gouache, poster paint, crayon, chalk, and pen and ink. Books, he said in an interview some years ago, “have always, for as long as I can recall, been a source of real magic in this wildly confusing world.” On Jan. 14 after a long illness in a hospital near his home in Glumso, Denmark.