Tasha Tudor, Children's Book Illustrator, Dies at 92

June 20, 2008
Douglas Martin

Tasha Tudor, a children's illustrator whose pastel watercolors and delicately penciled lines depicted an idyllic, old-fashioned vision of the 19th-century way of life she famously pursued — including weaving, spinning, gathering eggs and milking goats — died on Wednesday at her home in Marlboro, Vt.

She was 92, if one counts only the life that began on Aug. 28, 1915. Ms. Tudor frequently said that she was the reincarnation of a sea captain's wife who lived from 1800 to 1840 or 1842, and that it was this earlier life she was replicating by living so ardently in the past.

Her son Seth confirmed the death. He suggested that his mother's more colorful remarks might be taken with a pinch of salt.

A cottage industry grew out of Ms. Tudor's art, which has illustrated nearly 100 books. The family sells greeting cards, prints, plates, aprons, dolls, quilts and more, all in a sentimental, rustic, but still refined style resembling that of Beatrix Potter.

In her promotion of such a definitive lifestyle, Ms. Tudor has been called a 19th-century Martha Stewart. Books, videotapes, magazine articles and television shows illuminated her gardening and housekeeping ideas.

For 70 years her illustrations elicited wide admiration: The New York Times in 1941 said her pictures "have the same fragile beauty of early spring evenings."

Her drawings, particularly the early ones, often illustrated the almost equally memorable stories she herself wrote. Some details: Sparrow Post, a postal service for dolls with delivery by birds. Birthday parties featuring flotillas of cakes with lighted candles. Mouse Mills catalogs, for ordering dolls clothes made by mice, who take buttons for pay.

The Catholic Library World said in 1971 that Ms. Tudor shed "a special ray of sunshine" with pictures that carry "the imagination of children into history, into the human heart, into the joys of family life, into love of friendship itself."

Two of Ms. Tudor's books were named Caldecott Honor Books: "Mother Goose" (1944) and "1 Is One" (1956). Ms. Tudor was just awarded the Regina Medal by the Catholic Library Association.

But it was her uncompromising immersion in another, less comfortable century that most fascinated people. She wore kerchiefs, hand-knitted sweaters, fitted bodices and flowing skirts, and often went barefoot. She reared her four children in a home without electricity or running water until her youngest turned 5. She raised her own farm animals; turned flax she had grown into clothing; and lived by homespun wisdom: sow root crops on a waning moon, above-ground plants on a waxing one.

"It is healthful to sleep in a featherbed with your nose pointing north," she said in an interview with The Times in 1977.

Starling Burgess, who later legally changed both her names to Tasha Tudor, was born in Boston to well-connected but not wealthy parents. Her mother, Rosamond Tudor, was a portrait painter, and her father, William Starling Burgess, was a yacht and airplane designer who collaborated with Buckminster Fuller.

Ms. Tudor could not remember a time when she did not draw pictures or make little books. She was originally nicknamed Natasha by her father, after Tolstoy's heroine in "War and Peace." This was shortened to Tasha. After her parents divorced when she was 9, Ms. Tudor adopted her mother's last name.

In an autobiography she wrote in 1951, Ms. Tudor said she did not start school until she was 9, although other biographies say she began as early as 7. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for a year, but said she learned painting from her mother. Her art was often framed by ornate borders like those from a medieval manuscript, but more whimsical.

Partly to protect her from Jazz Age Greenwich Village, where her mother had moved, Ms. Tudor was sent to live with a couple in Connecticut, drama enthusiasts who included children in the plays they put on. She soon developed a love of times past and things rural, going to auctions to buy antique clothing before she was 10. At 15 she used money she had made teaching nursery school to buy her first cow.

In 1938 she married Thomas Leighton McCready Jr., who was in the real estate business. A fiddler played the wedding march. Mr. McCready encouraged his bride to put together a folio of pictures and seek publishers. She was repeatedly turned down before her first published book, "Pumpkin Moonshine" (1938), was accepted by Oxford University Press. It was the start of a flood, many still in print.

Ms. Tudor's favorite of all her books was "Corgiville Fair," one of several she wrote about the Welsh corgi dogs she kept as pets, sometimes 13 or 14 at once. Her 1963 illustrated version of "The Secret Garden," by Frances Hodgson Burnett, tells of children enraptured by a mysterious garden. The volume of Clement C. Moore's "Night Before Christmas" that she illustrated remains popular.

She rebuked those who said she must be enthralled with her own creativity.

"That's nonsense," she said. "I'm a commercial artist, and I've done my books because I needed to earn my living."

She and her husband moved to a 19th-century farmhouse in New Hampshire that lacked electricity and running water, but did have 17 rooms and 450 acres. Ms. Tudor painted in the kitchen, in between baking bread and washing dishes. She created a dollhouse with a cast of characters, two of whom were married in a ceremony covered by Life magazine.

Ms. Tudor was divorced from Mr. McCready, who later died, and from a second husband, Allan John Woods. In 1972 she sold the New Hampshire farm and moved onto her property near her son Seth in Marlboro.

In addition to Seth, Ms. Tudor is survived by her daughters Bethany Tudor of West Brattleboro, Vt., and Efner Tudor Holmes of Contoocook, N.H.; another son, Thomas, of Fairfax, Va.; eight grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and her half-sister, Ann Hopps of Camden, Me.

Ms. Tudor, who could play the dulcimer and handle a gun, once promised a reporter for The Times that she could find a four-leaf clover within five minutes and came back with a five-leaf one in four minutes. She kept a seven-leaf clover framed in her room.

She told The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk in 1996 that it was her intention to go straight back to the 1830s after her death.