Garth Williams

Garth Montgomery Williams (April 16, 1912 – May 8, 1996) was an American artist who came to prominence in the American postwar era as an illustrator of children's books.

Many of the books he illustrated have become classics of American children's literature.

"In Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, and in the Little House series of books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Williams['s] drawings have become inseparable from how we think of those stories. In that respect ... Williams['s] work belongs in the same class as Sir John Tenniel's drawings for Alice in Wonderland, or Ernest Shepard's illustrations for Winnie the Pooh."

His friendly, fuzzy baby animals populated a dozen Little Golden Books.

Mel Gussow in The New York Times wrote, "He believed that books 'given, or read, to children can have a profound influence!' For that reason, he said, he used his illustrations to try to 'awaken something of importance ... humor, responsibility, respect for others, interest in the world at large!'"

Born in New York City in 1912, Williams's father was a cartoonist for Punch and his mother was a landscape painter.

He described them by saying, "Everybody in my home was always either painting or drawing."

He grew up on farms in New Jersey and Canada until the family relocated to the United Kingdom in 1922, where his parents were from.

Williams studied architecture there, and worked for a time as an architect's assistant.

When the Great Depression came, he made up his mind to be an artist instead of an architect.

He began his studies at Westminster School of Art in 1929 and, in 1931, was awarded a four-year scholarship to the Royal College of Art where he created a sculpture that was awarded the British Prix de Rome.

He continued his education at the British School at Rome in Germany and Italy, until the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

In London, he volunteered with the British Red Cross Civilian Defense ambulances, and helped collect the dead and injured from the streets.

After a bomb blast vaporized a friend who had been walking next to him, he sent his wife and daughter to Canada, and reunited with them in New York in 1942.

In the United States, Williams worked making lenses at a war plant, applied for work as a camouflage artist, contributed war-effort posters to the British-American Art Center in New York, and brought his portfolio around to the major publishing houses.

He drew for The New Yorker for a mutually unfulfilling period of time.

Then, in 1945, he received his first commission as an illustrator, from editor Ursula Nordstrom of Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls.

The story is that Nordstrom "told him she was expecting a manuscript that he might illustrate. By coincidence, when the manuscript arrived the author had pinned a note to it: 'Try Garth Williams'. The author was E. B. White; the book was Stuart Little."

The Whites had wanted Robert Lawson to work on the project, but had burned through eight illustrators.

The book became a success with adults as well as children.

Williams later said that seeing grownups on buses and trains reading Stuart Little persuaded him to continue as a freelance illustrator.

Soon after, he began collaborating with Margaret Wise Brown with The Little Fur Family, Harper's answer to Simon & Schuster's Pat the Bunny.

Nordstrom knew that the book would be a success when a mother wrote to tell her that her little boy had held open his copy at the dinner table, and tried to feed it his supper.

In all, Williams illustrated eleven of Brown's books.

Williams received the commission to illustrate the new Little House edition in about 1947.

To know the worlds of Laura's childhood, Williams, who had never been west of the Hudson River, traveled the American Midwest to the places the Ingalls family had lived 70 years before, photographing and sketching landscapes, trees, birds and wildlife, buildings and towns.

In 1951 he illustrated Charlotte's Web (1952); his eldest child Fiona, who was a toddler when the family escaped the Blitz, was his model for Fern Arable.

In the latter part of his life, Williams lived primarily in Marfil, a small town west of Guanajuato, Mexico.

He was part of a colony of expatriates who built or rebuilt homes in the ruins of the silver mines of colonial Mexico.

At 81, he estimated that he had illustrated 97 books.

"The trip culminated in a search along the riverbank along Plum Creek where the family had once built their dugout home. Williams writes, in his 1953 account 'I did not expect to find the house, but I felt certain that it would have left an indentation in the bank. A light rain did not help my search, and I was about to give up when ahead of me I saw exactly what I was looking for, a hollow in the east bank of Plum Creek. I felt very well rewarded, for the scene fitted Mrs Wilder's description perfectly....' [He] wanted to ... be able to see the house on Plum Creek ... as Laura would have done, as a happy, flower bedecked refuge from the elements, with the music of the nearby stream. Which is how he drew it."

Ursula Nordstrom's initial plan was for Williams to produce eight oil paintings for each book, sixty-four in all.

This proved to be not cost-efficient.

Williams illustrated the Little House books with a simple pencil, charcoal, and ink.

Much of his work was accomplished in Italy.

In 1958, Garth Williams wrote and illustrated a picture book that caused a small uproar: The Rabbits' Wedding.

Aimed at children aged 3 to 7, it depicted animals in a moonlit forest attending the wedding of a white rabbit to a black rabbit.

In 1959, Alabama Senator E. O. Eddins and Alabama State Library Agency director Emily Wheelock Reed took the lead in a controversy over the book.

Senator Eddins, with the support of the White Citizens' Council and other segregationists, demanded that it be removed from all Alabama libraries because of its perceived themes of racial integration and interracial marriage.

Williams later illustrated the first edition of The First Four Years (1971), which is commonly considered the last of nine books in the Little House series.