In Cooney’s mind, children and animals were always with her, in person and on paper and she was plagued by the thought that the number of her commissions depended on “the quality of the fur she drew.” To outsiders, she was a Little Master. But the 1952 batch included two by Margaret Wise Brown, Where Have You Been? and Christmas in the Barn (both Crowell) - and led to another warmly regarded Brown/Cooney Christmas book, The Little Fir Tree (Crowell, 1954). Many she did for money, not for love: all those younglings to educate.
Then, after a brief wartime stint in the Women’s Army Corps (WACs), she entered upon a progression common to women of her generation: twenty busy years of “getting married and having children” (two marriages, four children), of “staying home and taking care of my family” - and, in Cooney’s case, “decorating books.”įrom the mid-1940s through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, there were very few years when she didn’t illustrate at least two or three books in 1952 her name was on six.
“The answer is that I love stories.”īetween 19 she illustrated three books, to some small effect, and wrote three of her own, to less effect. Though she had always drawn, it didn’t occur to her to go to art school - a matter sometimes of regret, sometimes of pride - but apparently she never considered being anything but a children’s book illustrator. In due course she went to boarding school, then to Smith College. Summers Cooney spent with her paternal grandmother on the Maine coast, the start of another lifelong allegiance. Mother was an amateur painter from a prominent German-American family of art and music patrons she was proudest, however, of the forebear who painted oils-by-the-yard and cigar store Indians. Father was a stockbroker with New England roots.
To succeed in a changing market, to satisfy her own ambitions, Cooney had to transform herself into a different kind of artist - a colorist and painter.įor Cooney, it was the work of a lifetime that began auspiciously in Brooklyn in 1917. But that particular accolade carried an implication, justified or not, of limitation. Barbara Cooney came late to center stage, after decades as an illustrator admired for her graphic arts skills.
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