The Private World of Tasha Tudor

Front Cover
Little, Brown, Oct 28, 1992 - Gardening - 144 pages
Tasha Tudor has written and illustrated more than seventy-five beloved children's books since her first, Pumpkin Moonshine, in 1938. Now seventy-seven years old, she lives on a farm in southern Vermont, where she has recreated an early Victorian world. To capture this intimate portrait of Tasha Tudor, photographer Richard Brown followed her throughout a year on her farm. By interweaving Tudor's own words and more than 100 color photographs, Brown has evoked the essence of Tudor's uniquely appealing personality and way of life.
The inspiration for Tudor's art is evident in her delightful surroundings. Foremost is the magnificent garden she designed and rightfully calls "Paradise on earth." A lively menagerie is always underfoot, indoors and out, including her trademark corgies, the Nubian goats she milks twice a day, the one-eyed cat Minou, the chickens, fantail doves, and the cockatiels, canaries, exotic finches, and parrots that inhabit a virtual village of antique cages.
We watch Tudor at work in a corner of her winter kitchen, her "chipmunk's nest," on the delicate watercolors and drawings that illustrate the books and calendars that have charmed three generations. Examples of her work are scattered throughout the book, including many drawings from her sketchbook and vignettes never previously published. Her enchanting three-story dollhouse is featured in detail as are her handmade dolls and marionettes as well as the candlelit tree that is the centerpiece of Tasha Tudor's old-fashioned New England Christmas.
Born in 1914 into Boston society (she sat on Oliver Wendell Holmes's knee as a child; Mark Twain and Albert Einstein were also her parents' friends), Tudor felt from an early age that she had lived before, in the 1830s. She says, "Everything comes so easily to me from that period, of that time: threading a loom, growing flax, spinning, milking a cow."
Dressed in antique clothing, spinning and weaving her own linen, cooking on a woodstove with nineteenth-century utensils, Tudor inhabits a world that in these evocative photographs speaks to all who long for a simpler existence in harmony with the seasonal rhythms of nature.

About the author (1992)

Author and illustrator Tasha Tudor was born in Boston, Massachusetts on August 28, 1915. Her first book, Pumpkin Moonshine, was published in 1938. Since then she has written or illustrated almost 100 books including her most recent title Corgiville Christmas, which was published in 2003. She won numerous awards throughout her lifetime including the Catholic Library Association's Regina Medal, the Walter Cerf Award for Lifetime Achievements in the Arts from the Vermont Arts Council, and Caldecott Honors for Mother Goose in 1945 and 1 Is One in 1957. She also created Christmas cards for the Irene Dash Greeting Card Company. She died on June 18, 2008.

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