Ada & Eleanor Skinner Jessie Wilcox Smith 1935 A Child's Book of Country Stories

Up For Sale Today is

A Child's Book of Country Stories

Compiled by Ada M. Skinner and Eleanor L. Skinner

Illustrated by

Jessie Willcox Smith

Hardcover. 4to.  Published by The Dial Press, Inc, New York, 1935. 265 pgs.  Reprint
 

Slipcased with a red paper covered slipcase with color pastedown present to the front of the slipcase. Slipcase is chipped and worn with some pencil work present to the rear of the box. . DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities (DJ is lightly chipped and worn). Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine and front board. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. Previous owner's name present to the FFEP.  Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid.

An anthology of stories of the four seasons by a variety of contributors, whose names appear in the contents.

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Jessie Willcox Smith (September 6, 1863 – May 3, 1935) was one of the most prominent female illustrators in the United States during the Golden Age of American illustration. She was a prolific contributor to respected books and magazines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She illustrated stories and articles for clients such as Century, Collier's, Leslie's Weekly, Harper's, McClure's, Scribners, and the Ladies' Home Journal. She had an ongoing relationship with Good Housekeeping, including the long-running Mother Goose series of illustrations and creating all the covers from 1915 to 1933. Among the more than 60 books that Smith illustrated were Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline, and Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.

Smith met Elizabeth Shippen Green and Violet Oakley while studying at Drexel with whom she would share talent, mutual interests, and lifelong friendship. The women shared a studio on Philadelphia's Chestnut Street. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline, illustrated by Oakley and Smith, was published in 1897.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Smith's career flourished. She illustrated a number of books, magazines, and created an advertisement for Ivory soap. Her works were published in Scribner's, Harper's Bazaar, Harper's Weekly, and St. Nicholas Magazine. She won an award for Child Washing. Green, Smith, and Oakley became known as "The Red Rose Girls" after the Red Rose Inn in Villanova, Pennsylvania where they lived and worked together for four years beginning in the early 1900s. They leased the inn where they were joined by Oakley's mother, Green's parents, and Henrietta Cozens, who managed the gardens and inn. Alice Carter created a book about the women entitled The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love for an exhibition of their work at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Museum Director Laurie Norton Moffatt said of them, "These women were considered the most influential artists of American domestic life at the turn of the twentieth century. Celebrated in their day, their poetic, idealized images still prevail as archetypes of motherhood and childhood a century later."

Green and Smith illustrated the calendar, The Child in 1903. Smith exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts that year and won the Mary Smith Prize. When the artists lost the lease on the Red Rose Inn in 1904, a farmhouse was remodeled for them in West Mount Airy, Philadelphia by Frank Miles Day. They named their new shared home and workplace "Cogslea", drawn from the initials of their surnames and that of Smith's roommate, Henrietta Cozens.

Smith's style changed drastically through her life. In the beginning of her career she used dark lined borders to delineate brightly coloured objects and people in a style described as "Japanesque". In later works she softened the lines and colours until they almost disappeared. Smith worked in mixed media: oil, watercolor, pastels, gouache, charcoal, whatever she felt gave her desired effect. She often overlaid oils on charcoal, on a paper whose grain or texture added an important element to the work. Her use of colour was influenced by the French impressionist painters.

Most of Smith's work is primarily concerned with children and motherly love. Many reviewers say Smith was continually trying to recreate the image of love she had desperately needed as a child. Smith preferred to use real children as opposed to child actors, because she found professional children did not have the same soul, or will to explore, as amateur child models. She would invite her friends to visit, and watch their children play, to use that as her inspiration.