There was once a family of seven brothers and sisters. Sadly, their father, an artist frustrated in his ambitions, died when the oldest child, a girl, was only fifteen. His dying wish was that she take up his dream of becoming a successful artist: "What Papa couldn't do," he told her, "Wanda would have to finish.".
It is hard to say how much her father's request urged Wanda Gag on to become the accomplished graphic artist, illustrator, and author that she did, but it does appropriately cast her life in the mold of the fairy tales she variously created, translated, and illustrated during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
In this meticulously researched assessment of Gag's life in relation to her work for children, Karen Nelson Hoyle traces her transformation from eldest daughter in a poor family from New Ulm, Minnesota, to admired and influential artist and author in the nascent industry of modern children's book publishing in New York City.
Wanda Gag championed fairy tales. While their popularity ebbed and flowed during the thirty-year span of her working life, Gag devoted much of her career as a children's book author to the imaginative retelling and illustrating of fairy tales. She translated from the German and illustrated three collections of Grimm fairy tales as well as the single volume Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
And her original stories (such as The Funny Thing, about a gentle mountain man trying to appease a strange animal who eats children's dolls, and Snippy and Snappy, about two wayward mice) share with fairy tales the qualities of being fantastic and unbelievable on the one hand and wise and instructive about the nature of human experience on the other.
But of all ten books Gag published for children, the most loved and best known remains her first, Millions of Cats, published in 1928.
With more than 1 million copies now in print, Millions of Cats employs several innovative techniques - some now staples of picture books - for which Gag became recognized: imaginative use of the two-page spread; hand-lettered text that reflects the spirit of the illustrations; a purposeful employment of line drawing with black ink on white paper, thereby reviving a form found in nineteenth-century newspaper and magazine illustrations.
The story of a lonely old couple who seek out a cat for companionship and for a time end up with "Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats" at their doorstep, Millions of Cats typifies Gag's method of telling a story: sparely, with careful consideration of how to advance plot and develop character while linking the text with the illustrations.
The book also portrays her favorite subjects: hilly landscapes, country people, animals, flowers, homey cottages, the furnishings of domestic life. Relying on her extensive knowledge of Gag's life and work - gleaned from access to Gag's personal and professional papers and correspondence with people who knew her - Hoyle has not only drawn a precise and detailed portrait of a gifted artist and author but also delineated a seminal period in the history of children's book publishing.
