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Obituaries


Dick Bruna 23 August 1927- 16 February 2017


Dick Bruna, who died aged 89, wrote and illustrated over two hundred picture books in addition to devising many book covers and posters. The adventures of his most famous character Miffy, a small female rabbit dressed in human clothes, were translated into forty languages with total book sales exceeding 85 million copies.


Bruna started drawing from an early age, designing covers for his school newspaper. Having kept rabbits as a boy, he had a soft spot for these animals that had also provided his family with much needed food during the war. In 1955, he told his oldest son Sierk a series of stories about the white rabbit. Drawing the same rabbit as well, Bruna decided to fuse story and illustration into a picture book called Nijntje. This childish mispronunciation in Dutch of the phrase ‘little rabbit’ was translated in 1970 by Olive Stone into the name Miffy.


Always outlined with a thick black line, staring straight at the reader and accompanied on each opposite page by four lines of text, Miffy did not prove an instant success. Parents found the little books with their abundant use of white space and no sense of perspective too simple. The six different primary colours Bruna limited himself to also seemed over-bright. But infants thought differently. With each mini-adventure conveyed in only twelve pages and covering ordinary events such as visits to grandparents, making a snowman or going to school, here were stories easy to recognise from real life. Miffy’s static presence and narrow range of expressions, limited by a face that consisted only of a diagonal cross for a mouth and two dots for eyes, meant that infants – freed from other distracting detail – quickly came to understand what she was feeling. The books themselves, measuring only 16x16cm, were also easy for young hands to grasp.


Not everyone was enchanted. Dutch librarians declined to


recommend his twelve picture versions of Hop-o’-My-Thumb and Cinderella on the grounds that these complex, rich stories should never be simplified down to such a basic level of illustration and text. But Miffy herself proved unstoppable, both in books and later as a brand, where she featured on over 10,000 products, although Bruna vetoed suggestions that she should also appear on toy guns and racing cars. Later Miffy stories also partially answered criticisms of previous sentimentality by taking on tougher themes to do with race and disability.


Taking an average of three months over each title, Bruna would produce hundreds of sketches until he was satisfied. Years were also spent finding just the right shades of the reds, blues, greens and yellows that make up the bulk of his effects. Those he finally settled on are now known as Bruna colours. First painting his character in outline with a specially trimmed paintbrush, he would then cut out coloured paper shapes to make up their clothes and supply backgrounds. There was then the long process of trial and error until he was convinced that he had got every expression right for its part in the story. If Miffy is sad, she may be allowed one tear, but in general the skill in getting over her emotions using the minimum of detail is one that Bruna managed to perfection.


Knighted by Queen Beatrix in 1993, he lived to see a statue to Miffy erected in Utrecht. This was joined in 2006 by the Dick Bruna Huis, a permanent exhibition of the artist’s best work housed opposite the town’s Centraal Museum. Cycling seven days a week from the house he had lived in for forty years to his studio in Utrecht every morning until he was over eighty, he remained a universally popular local figure. Modest, unfailingly hospitable to his fans, he combined being one of Holland’s principal exports with an unassuming charm of manner that stayed with him to the last.


14 Books for Keeps No.223 March 2017


Dahlov Ipcar 12 November 1917 - 10 February 2017


Better known in in America than Britain but still with many publications over here, Dahlov Ipcar was one of the most distinctive illustrators of her time. Regularly published between 1945 and 1986, she saw herself as belonging to a movement subsequently known as mid-century modern. Breaking away from previously accepted conventions, her brightly coloured illustrations with their stylised static surroundings reached back into folk art while also looking forward to ground-breaking experimentation.


Ipcar grew up in New York’s Greenwich Village. Her father William Zorach was a distinguished sculptor and her mother Marguerite an equally celebrated artist. Always painting as a child she was encouraged by her parents who believed it better for her find her own way rather than go for any formal artistic training.


Marrying


aged 19, she and her husband started their own dairy farm, working hard but with Ipcar continuing to produce pictures for her own pleasure. But she was soon spotted, having a solo exhibition in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1939 when she was only 21.


Her publishing breakthrough came in 1945 when she provided the illustrations for Margaret Wise Brown’s The Little Fisherman. Still in print, this picture book took inspiration from the Maine coast where Ipcar’s family used to go for holidays and where she now lived in Georgetown with her husband and two children. Its image of fishing boats with brown sails heading towards what must be the brightest sunrise ever still has the power to amaze.


Thirty-two more richly patterned pictures books were to come, very soon with texts provided by the artist herself. One Horse Farm combines social realism with a lyrical description of the link between a farmer and his faithful steed. My Wonderful Christmas Tree recreates a winter landscape crammed with natural life. Later picture books moved away from naturalism towards increasing abstraction in a style she called ‘non-intellectual cubism.’ Her work remained utterly individual all her painting life, winning many honours and awards. She also provided murals for public buildings including post offices in Tennessee and Oklahoma.


Ipcar also wrote four fantasy novels for older readers. A Dark Horn Blowing describes a woman spirited away to help rear the sickly child of the evil Erl King. The Queen of Spells is an updating of the traditional balled Tam Lan. Here Janet, a Pennsylvania farmer’s daughter, is determined to bring back her ghostly lover from a land beyond reality once she discovers she is pregnant by him. Not popular with every critic, these and her other novels still have a cult status with some.


After losing her husband Adolph in 2003 after 68 years of marriage Ipcar lived alone but kept in close touch with her two sons and grandchildren. Having slipped out of fashion her picture books found a new audience during the last two decades. Enjoying her revived fame, she was still happiest in the company of the racoons and foxes living in the forty acres of woods she owned around her home. She hardly ever rarely travelled beyond Maine and never outside America, preferring her own company and the chance to paint every day in the studio added to their old farmhouse by her husband. She was still painting despite declining eyesight on the morning of her death at the age of 99.


Nicholas Tucker is honorary senior lecturer in Cultural and Community Studies at Sussex University.


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