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!'"

Garth Williams was born in New York City in 1912 to English artists, his father was a cartoonist for Punch, his mother was a landscape painter. "Everybody in my home was always either painting or drawing." He grew up on farms in New Jersey and Canada, but In 1922 he and his family moved to the United Kingdom. Williams studied architecture and worked for a time as an architect's assistant. But 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. In a fortuitous 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.

Shortly thereafter he began his collaboration 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.

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.

An illustration by Garth Williams for Charlotte's Web showing his techniques of careful lines, detail, action, emotion, texture, and shading

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. His studio was the center of the house, with five drawing tables and 16 skylights; the house also featured a waterfall. He was an excellent guitarist and occasional banjo player, and told stories of busking in London during his art school tenure. At 81, he estimated he had illustrated 97 books.

At 84 Williams died at his home in Marfil; he was buried in Aspen, Colorado. He had been married four different times throughout his life, and had five daughters: Fiona and Bettina from his first marriage; Jessica and Estyn from his second; Dilys from his fourth; and a son, Dylan, from his third marriage.

Little House illustrations (1953)

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. "The trip culminated in a search along the riverbank along Plum Creek where the family had built their dugout home, so long ago.

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.

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.

The Rabbits' Wedding controversy (1958)

In 1958 Garth Williams wrote and illustrated a book that caused a small uproar: The Rabbits' Wedding. The illustrated picture book, aimed towards children aged 3 to 7, depicted animals in a moonlit forest attending the wedding of a white rabbit to a black rabbit. In 1959, the book became the center of a controversy, with Alabama Senator E. O. Eddins and Alabama State Library Agency director Emily Wheelock Reed as the key players. Senator Eddins, with the support of the White Citizens' Council and other segregationists, demanded that the book be removed from all Alabama libraries because of its perceived themes of racial integration and interracial marriage. Emily Wheelock Reed reviewed the book and, finding no objectionable content, determined it was her ethical duty to defend the book against an outright ban. A battle ensued between Reed and her supporters, and the segregationist faction in the legislature. In the end, the book was not banned outright, but rather placed on special reserve shelves in the state library agency-run facilities. Libraries that had purchased their own copies were not required to make this change.

Since the controversy, there has been more critical analysis done on the book. Some have noted the obvious logic of illustrating the rabbits with two different colors so the reader might tell them apart more readily. Others, in their quest to depoliticize the book, have claimed a perception of the black and white motif as, perhaps, a reference to yin and yang (i.e. male and female, though, inconsistently, the color-to-gender associations in the book are reversed). About the controversy, Williams stated, "I was completely unaware that animals with white fur, such as white polar bears and white dogs and white rabbits, were considered blood relations of white beings. I was only aware that a white horse next to a black horse looks very picturesque." Williams said his story was not written for adults, who "will not understand it, because it is only about a soft furry love and has no hidden message of hate".

Williams described his approach to illustrating books in a 1980 interview. His initial reading of the material usually would suggest thirty or forty potential pictures. "'To compose the pictures is very hard...I look for all the action in the story; then I arrange forms and color. I always try to imagine what the author is seeing. Of course, I have to narrow down my ideas to the number of drawings I'm allowed, which might be as few as ten per book. I make a list of illustrations. When I see a picture, I write down the idea and a page number while I read the manuscript.'"

Garth Williams drew few straight lines. He used charcoal and graphite pencils, from fine to very soft, to illustrate the Little House books. The "youngest" book in the series, Little House in the Big Woods, is nearly lamplit in its coziness, almost an echo of the small-animal sensibilities of The Fur Family or his deeply colored Little Golden Books. He used pen and ink for The Cricket in Times Square, the Rescuers books, Charlotte's Web, and Stuart Little. The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies is noteworthy for Williams' extensive use of colored pencil. In the Golden Books and Little Golden Books, he favored oil pastels, ink washes, and watercolor. The Rabbits' Wedding (1958), which employed a limited palette of only a few delicate colors, contained some of the best-reproduced examples of his ability to convey hair, hide, grass, and fur textures.