Tasha Tudor, a children's book illustrator and author whose delicate and dreamy artwork was featured in about 80 books, including a 1944 edition of "Mother Goose" that was so successful it enabled her to buy a farm and create a lifestyle rooted in the early 19th century, has died. She was 92.
Tudor died Wednesday of complications related to old age at her home in Marlboro, Vt., her family announced.
Long admired for their charm, her books were filled with sentimental yet realistic illustrations of quaint New England settings, intricate floral borders and often-barefoot children whose clothes reflected the 1830s, her favorite time period.
After publishing her first book, "Pumpkin Moonshine" in 1938, Tudor illustrated a number of classics, including 1962 editions of "The Secret Garden" and "The Night Before Christmas." Her final book, "Corgiville Christmas," published in 2003, reflected her passion for the Welsh corgi dogs she surrounded herself with and also featured in the book that was her favorite -- "Corgiville Fair" (1971).
Twice, she was a runner-up for the Caldecott Medal, in 1945 for her artwork in "Mother Goose" and in 1957 for "1 is One," her book of verse.
With the royalties from "Mother Goose," Tudor purchased a rundown house from the 1790s in New Hampshire that had no electricity or running water. On 450 acres, she raised four children, who sometimes posed for illustrations in period garb.
Her chosen lifestyle came from "nostalgia for a day and time that was more peaceful and slow," Tudor told the Chicago Tribune in 1991. When she went to town, her children "were very careful to walk a good 10 or 12 feet behind me so that they wouldn't be associated with . . . a rather different-looking woman."
Later, she figured she must have done something right when three of her children adopted her lifestyle as adults.
She credited the commercialism of her art to the need to earn a living after divorcing her husband, Thomas L. McCready, whom she married in 1938. An author and suburbanite, he was not cut out for such a rural existence.
"If I had married a man who could have supported me I would have ended up making paper dolls and gardening. But the wolf at the door is very good for people," Tudor said in the Tribune.
The nearly 40 books she illustrated for others often featured popular fairy tales, nursery rhymes, prayers and Scripture. Her artwork also appeared in books written by her former husband and in others by a daughter, Efner.
