The Boston Common from “Make Way for Ducklings,” a Maine hillside covered with blueberries and a sperm whale are all featured in an exhibit of Robert McClokey’s work at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst.
It’s a celebration of the 75th anniversary of McCloskey’s most famous tale, “Make Way for Ducklings” (1941).
Recipient of two Caldecott Medals and three Caldecott Honors, McCloskey was a major force in 20th-century children’s literature, despite working on fewer than 20 titles during his lifetime. He wrote and illustrated eight books of his own and illustrated 10 stories by other authors — including “Journey Cake, Ho!” (1953), written by his mother-in-law, Ruth Sawyer.
“I’m not prolific,” he once said. “It had to be right, and it often was.”
“Americana on Parade: The Art of Robert McCloskey” features more than 90 original artworks, ephemera and rare preliminary book materials. While emphasis centers on “Make Way for Ducklings,” the exhibition considers McCloskey’s entire career, ranging from his early publications Lentil (1940), Homer Price (1943) and Centerburg Tales (1951), which recall the artist’s youth in rural Ohio, to the family-based stories set in his adopted home state of Maine, such as “Blueberries for Sal.”
That book tells the story of a mother and her young daughter’s day blueberry picking on a Maine hillside that ends up with the child and a bear cub following the wrong parent.
Another book set in Maine, “Time of Wonder” (1957), explores the Maine coast through a child’s eyes.
Curated by H. Nichols B. Clark, founding director of the Eric Carle museum and chief curator emeritus, the exhibition also showcases a selection of independent work — watercolors and paintings that connect McCloskey to such prominent American painters as Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper.
McCloskey as a child loved to paint, play the harmonica and tinker with machines as a boy.
“I collected old electric motors and bits of wire, old clocks and Meccano sets. I built trains and cranes with remote controls, my family’s Christmas trees revolved, lights flashed and buzzers buzzed, fuses blew and sparks flew. The inventor’s life was the life for me — that is, until I started making drawings for the high school annual.”
Despite his talent, McCloskey’s lofty artistic aspirations were grounded by the reality that his paintings were not selling. He came to illustration almost by accident when he called upon the legendary children’s book editor May Massee at Viking Press. Massee was the aunt of one of McCloskey’s high school classmates. Reviewing his portfolio of pretentious drawings and ideas about Pegasus, Spanish galleons and other exalted literary subjects, Massee counseled the fledgling artist to focus on what he knew. McCloskey went home to Ohio and took this advice to heart.
McCloskey often expressed bemusement at his fabled career. There had, he said, been so few children’s books when he was growing up that it had never occurred to him that he would one day work in the same “field.” He claimed he didn’t know anything about children’s literature: “I think in pictures,” he said. “I fill in between pictures with words. My first book I wrote in order to have something to illustrate.”
It was, however, a story McCloskey had heard about a family of ducks that stopped traffic in the streets of Boston that piqued his interest and led to the book that would catapult him to fame and firmly establish his professional vocation. He spent two years studying mallard specimens at the American Museum of Natural History and seeking guidance from an ornithologist. And then … he purchased 16 ducks that came to live in his small Greenwich Village apartment and serve as models.