Nino Carbe: 
Behind the Animations

You probably haven’t heard of Nino Carbe, but if you were a kid any time from the 1940s through the 1980s, you have seen his work. Carbe drew backgrounds for many of the great animators — from Walt Disney and Walter Lantz to Hanna Barbera and Filmation — whose productions appeared both on the big screen and on television.

Carbe, who lived in Ridgefield in the 1950s and early 60s, also illustrated many books, especially for children.

A native of Sicily, Nino Carbe was born in 1909 and immigrated with his family when he was three. He was soon exhibiting talent at both art and classical violin, but excelled at the former. At the age of 16, he began studying art at the Cooper Union.

By his early 20s Carbe was illustrating books for New York City publishers, including such classics as Tales of the Arabian Nights, Cyrano de Bergerac and Frankenstein. In 1936, he moved to California and was soon hired by Walt Disney for whom he drew backgrounds of such Disney feature-length classics Fantasia, Bambi, Pinocchio, and Dumbo, as well as many shorter “cartoons.”

During World War II, he worked on Victory through Air Power and other projects for the Army. Disney also lent his talents to Walter Lantz — creator of Woody Woodpecker — who was producing military training films using animation.

After the war Carbe returned to illustrating books for children and also began ranging into such work as designing fabrics and Christmas cards. He and his wife, Betty, moved East to be closer to publishers and in 1953, he bought a house on Ledges Road. 

In 1964, he returned to California and to Disney, working on films such as The Jungle Book. When Walt Disney died in 1966, he joined Walter Lantz, creating the backgrounds for some of the last Woody Woodpecker cartoons, along with TV series like Chilli Willi and The Beary Family.

He then worked for Hanna Barbera as an artist for The All New Superfriends Hour, and Filmation, creating settings for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series on TV. He also designed and drew backgrounds and layouts for Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 The Lord of the Rings animation.

Late in life, Carbe turned to painting, producing many oils, acrylics and watercolors,   experimented in bronze sculpture, and designed batik scarves and even clothing. And on the more practical side, he also built furniture.

Nino Carbe died in 1993. Betty died in 2018; they are buried in her family’s plot in Bonaparte, Iowa.

Nino and Betty Carbe had two daughters. Elizabeth “Liza” Carbe, a writer and journalist in California, maintains a website, ninocarbe.com, displaying and honoring her father’s work. 

Daughter Victoria “Vicki” Carbe Valentino, an alumna of Veterans Park and Ridgefield High Schools, became an actress who appeared in a dozen movies and on TV. In the 1960s, she was a Playboy Bunny — she was “Miss September” in 1963. She later became a registered nurse. 

More recently, Vicki Carbe  was in the news as one of the dozens of women who publicly accused comedian Bill Cosby of sexual assault.  In 1970 when she was 24, she said, Cosby raped her at his apartment after giving her a pill that rendered her immobile. “We are vindicated, we are validated,” she told USA Today after Cosby was sentenced to prison in 2018.

Richard M. Powers:

The Art of Science Fiction

Millions of  readers — especially of sci-fi — have seen his pictures, but few knew the name of Richard M. Powers, the artist whose work revolutionized science-fiction art and has appeared on the covers of more than 800 of the best science fiction books.

Powers’s career spanned more than 50 years. “During that time he established himself as one of America’s preeminent illustrators for science fiction novels as he transformed that style of illustration with what he once termed ‘abstract surrealist expressionism,’ nearly creating a style of fantasy art,” wrote Ridgefield Press reporter Jonathan Pingle in 1996.

In 1983, Locus, the science fiction industry’s newspaper, described his work as having “revolutionized science fiction book cover art in the fifties.” 

Richard Michael Gorman Powers — he sometimes used the name Gorman Powers, reflecting his mother’s maiden name — was born in Chicago in 1921. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois, and during World War II served with the Army Signal Corps. After the war he continued his studies at The New School in New York.

In 1949 Powers began doing art for Doubleday’s science fiction hardcover books, and was an almost immediate success. He wound up doing the cover art for such classics as Isaac Asimov’s Pebble in the Sand and Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. 

In 1952 he was included in the New Talent Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where his work is now part of the permanent collection. Over the years he has also exhibited at  the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  the National Academy, and at the Whitney Museum, all in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.  

In 2001, Jane Frank, Vincent Di Fate, and son Richard Gid Powers wrote a book, The Art of Richard Powers.  DiFate, a science fiction artist, said Powers had “an emotional rhythm that is captivating, plumbing the depths of the human spirit and challenging the will of that spirit to survive in a future life with danger. These paintings are far more than insightful, they are, in a word, brilliant.”

As an illustrator, his work went beyond science fiction, appearing in all areas of publishing from the late 1940s to the 1990s. He produced literally thousands of book jackets and covers including the first edition of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, the Dell Laurel Poets series, and most the Easton Press’s editions of Hemingway’s works.

He also did the book jacket and some interior illustrations for Silvio Bedini’s Ridgefield in Review, the 1958 history published for the town’s 250th anniversary celebration. In 1983, for the town’s 275th birthday, he did a poster of the Battle of Ridgefield.

 Powers and his family moved to Ramapoo Road in 1954, then to Old Branchville Road. In 1966, he sold his Old Branchville Road house, building a smaller home on his remaining land on Bloomer Road. 

He died in 1996 in Madrid, Spain, where he had been wintering each year with his daughter, Elizabeth. (His son, Richard Gid Powers, is a history professor and author of such books as  Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover and Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI.)

Richard Powers was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2016. 

He was also honored in a rather unusual way. In 2017, Andy Partridge, former frontman of the British New wave band XTC, released a CD of music inspired by Powers’ art. According to Partridge, as a boy, he used to borrow three science fiction books a week, take them home and instead of reading them, he’d stare at the Richard Powers art. “Mesmerized by the covers,” he imagined his own stories to match the paintings as he stared at them, sometimes for hours.  Later, he created “a sort of soundtrack to the paintings,” as one critic put it.  “The resulting album [is] a musical accompaniment to the variety of alien landscapes which Powers illustrated so profusely.”

The name of the CD album? “Powers.”

Charles Roswell Bacon: 

An Unappreciated Artist

Among the thousands of gravestones in the Ridgefield Cemetery off North Salem Road is one lying on the ground. It’s hard to tell whether the stone was once upright and fell over, or was placed flat when it was new. But slowly the surrounding sod has been covering the face so that it is becoming harder and harder to read.

The disappearing gravestone is perhaps symbolic of the life and death of Charles   Roswell Bacon, a promising American artist and father of noted American author and illustrator Peggy Bacon. The son of a man who drank himself to death, Bacon lost two sons in infancy, struggled with poverty as he sought success as a painter and, depressed over the lack of recognition for his work, killed himself.

Born in New York City in 1867 to a middle-class family, Charles Roswell Bacon knew hard times from a very young age. His father, after the failure of his business as a marble importer, drank

himself to death when Charles was only six years old, and Bacon left public school at the age of 10 to help support his family. However, he showed an early talent for painting, and was able to study at the Art Students’ League in Manhattan. There he met his future wife, Elizabeth Chase, a miniaturist who came from Kentucky.

The artistic pair studied for a year in Paris, including spending time with Claude Monet at Giverny. They returned to the United States and wound up in Ridgefield where they were married  in 1892 and, to support themselves, took jobs managing a new resort hotel here. 

The Inn, built in 1891-92 on the eastern side of southern Main Street,  operated only during

the warmer months, giving both Bacons a chance to paint and travel in the off-season. They continued to operate the hotel into the early 1900s.

Their daughter, Margaret Frances “Peggy” Bacon, was born there in 1895. Two sons born later died in infancy, and are buried in Ridgefield Cemetery.

The three Bacons became a tight-knit family, one that Peggy Bacon remembered with fondness.

“I had the most charming and amusing parents,” she said in a 1973 interview. “We led a very close life together. There was a great deal of reading aloud. They were both very well read.”

“Mother and Father were never affluent. That’s putting it mildly,” Peggy told a Smithsonian Institution interviewer. “As I recall, all my life we had an extraordinary amount of amenities and delicacies even, and delights considering that they were poverty-stricken. The food was marvelous, very gourmet food. And there were quantities of books, endless books arriving. And a great deal of charm. 

“They were people of taste. Father was very well-read in French. He spoke French so well

that French people mistook him for a Frenchman. And yet he had no schooling from the age of ten.”

When the Inn was closed off-season, “We spent certain winters in New York when I was a child,” Peggy Bacon said. “He took me around to galleries. Then we lived in France for a couple of years, at Montreaux-sur-Mer in Picardy. It was absolutely delightful….It was a lovely life, really. Well, Father was very gregarious.”

Peggy herself was largely home-schooled as a child. Because they were always struggling to earn enough money to live on, the Bacons were unable to send Peggy to the equivalent of high school. Seeing this, two family friends in Ridgefield paid to send Peggy to a boarding school, Kent Place School in Summit, N.J. 

Perhaps it was at this time that Charles composed the poem and drew the self-portrait and sketch of Peggy that is now in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection. He wrote:

“What is it that this Daddy wants?

“Perhaps a drink o’water!

“O! No. He is so sad because

“He wants his Little Daughter.”

At the turn of the 20th Century, Charles Bacon was gaining some notoriety. He had exhibitions at the Fulton Gallery and at the Milch Gallery in New York. His works were also in the famous Armory Show in Manhattan in the early 1910s. 

However, by 1913 when he and Elizabeth had a home in South Salem and he had a studio   in Manhattan, he was becoming increasingly depressed. And on Friday, Oct. 10, he went to his studio, apparently finished a landscape he had been painting, wrote a two-sentence will, and turned on the gas jets in the room. He was found dead by a janitor the next day.

The New York Times had never covered Bacon’s work until he died. Like a yellow tabloid, it then did the 725-word story about the discovery of his body, under the headline, “Find Artist Dead A Suicide by Gas.”

The story reported police finding a note, composed to be his will. “I leave to my beloved wife everything of which I die possessed — pictures, frames, clothes, everything. Intending this night to commit suicide, I cannot have this witnessed, but it should carry conviction with it.”

While his wife and daughter were shocked at the suicide, there had been signs that the artist was troubled.

“Mr. Bacon had been despondent for some time over the lack of recognition of his work by the public and critics,” The Times reported his brother-in-law, J.W. Colt, as saying.

Three months later, the newspaper carried a brief story about the sale of his studio full of paintings at the Anderson Galleries. The entire collection brought $4,255 — more than $100,000 in today’s dollars, with the biggest sale being $435 ($10,800 in 2018).

Today, a fact that might surprise the painter, Bacon’s works sell for as much as $7,000 at at auctions. Some, however, fetch only a few hundred dollars.

Elizabeth continued to live in the 18th Century farmhouse at the corner of Spring Street and Boutonville Road in South Salem, and by the 1930s was operating an antiques business. A barn on her property was used as an office by both the local visiting nurses and as the performance venue for an active South Salem theater group. However, in the 1950s the barn was purchased and moved to Route 35 where it became the dining room — and probably the namesake — of the popular restaurant called The Hayloft.

Bacon was not only a painter, but a poet, whose work appeared in magazines and newspapers at the turn of the 20th Century. Probably his best-known poem was published in The Century magazine in 1901 and was reprinted in newspapers across the country. It was a somewhat dark work that ended, unlike his life, on a note of hope:  

UNDER THE SUN

The men who have gone before us

Have sung the songs we sing; 

The words of our clamorous chorus,

They were heard of the ancient king.

The chords of the lyre that thrill us,

They were struck in the years gone by,

And the arrows of death that kill us

Are found where our fathers lie.

The vanity sung of the Preacher

Is vanity still to-day;

The moan of the stricken creature

Has rung in the woods alway.

But the songs are worth resinging, 

With the change of no single note.

And the spoken words are ringing

As they rang in the years remote.

There is no new road to follow, Love!

Nor need there ever be,

For the old, with its hill and hollow, Love,

is enough for you and me.

 John Walter Scott Jr.: 

Artist of the West

John Walter Scott Jr. had a varied and successful career as an illustrator and an artist whose works were enjoyed by millions of people, most of whom did not know his name.

Born in 1907 in New Jersey, Scott was attending art school at the age of 16, and by the time he was in his 20s, was freelancing covers for some of the leading pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s, including All Star Fiction, Best Western, Detective Short Stories, Future Fiction,  Marvel Science Stories, Mystery Tales, Quick-Trigger Western, Real Sports, Two-Gun Western,  Uncanny Tales, and Western Novel and Short Stories.

By the late 1930s, he was moving to slick magazines like Coronet, Woman’s Day and This Week, doing covers and story illustrations.

During the war, he joined the staff of Yank, an Army magazine covering events on the European battle front. His war drawings are now part of the Army’s historical archives.

After the war, he began to focus his illustrations on the outdoors, doing hunting and fishing pictures for Sports Afield, True, and Argosy, all men’s magazines.  He eventually got commissions

for large-scale murals in major buildings; some of his best-known were for the Mormon temples at Salt Lake City and Washington, D.C.

John Scott spent his last years as an artist of the Old West — perhaps he was influenced by the pulp western covers he did in the 1930s as well as by the work of Frederic Remington — who died in Ridgefield two years after Scott was born. In the 1970s and 80s, he was being referred to as the “dean of the Remington Traditionalists.” His western works show up on the art market today; one recently sold at auction for $22,500. (Originals of his 1930s pulp fiction cover art fetch as much as $12,000.)

Even as an illustrator, Scott painted what he liked to paint, but in his final years, he seemed to enjoy himself most as an artist of the West. “I paint the pictures I am interested in painting,” he once

told an interviewer. “Much of contemporary art is about people who think they are ‘in.’ The quickest way to lose yourself is to lose your individuality. The important thing is to be yourself and forget about being ‘in.’ ”

Mr. Scott died in 1987 at the age of 79. He was married to Flavia “Punky” Scott, also an artist, who died in 2011; her father was prolific magazine artist, Frank Bensing. 

The Scotts, who came here in 1948, owned an 1860s house on North Salem Road that is now on the National Register of Historic Places; it was once the home of early circus manager Lewis June. 

Richard Scarry:  

The Father of Busytown

The man who created Bananas Gorilla with his armload of watches, Sergeant Murphy blowing his whistle, and Mr. Fixit with his chest of tools, was — in his early years — a Ridgefielder.

Many kids who grew up from the 1960s onward knew the creations of Richard Scarry. Huckle Cat, Lowly Worm, and many other characters from his pen have been friends to tens of millions of children. 

“Scarry revealed to kids that the everyday world was a place that could be understood — and that learning was fun,” said one biography of the author and illustrator. 

Born in 1919 in Boston, Richard Scarry dropped out of business school and then studied at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. After serving as an Army lieutenant during World War II, he became a freelance artist in New York City. 

In 1950, he illustrated Katherine Jackson’s “The Animals Merry Christmas” for Simon and Schuster, and a career was born; first editions of this 19-cent book can fetch hundreds of dollars today. 

In February 1951, he and his wife Patsy moved to Ridgefield from New York City, leasing a place on the Conklin farm on North Street — a locale that inspired many of his later farm illustrations. In 1953, the couple bought their first home, also on North Street. The Scarrys could often be seen driving around town in their MG sports car. 

Throughout the 50s he illustrated books for Golden Press. In 1955, he did Jane Werner’s “Smokey the Bear,” a Golden Book. Many of today’s images of Smoky the Bear are based on Scarry’s imagining of him. 

In 1953, their son was born;  though they named him Richard Jr., he was always called Huck — like the Busytown cat who would follow — and today Huck Scarry produces children’s books himself. 

In 1959, the Scarrys moved to Westport, and 10 years later, to Switzerland. 

Scarry’s first major success as an author illustrator was “The Best Word Book Ever,” published in 1963, which introduced Busytown; it sold more than seven million copies in its first 12 years. Over his 26-year career, he did more than 300 books that have sold more than 100 million copies in 30 languages; scores are still in print. 

“I’m not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten,” he once said. “I am very happy when people write that they have worn out my books, or that they are held together by Scotch tape. I consider that the ultimate compliment.” 

He died in 1994 in Switzerland at the age of 75. His papers and much of his art are now in the University of Connecticut archives. Huck lives in Vienna.

Robert Kraus: 

Cartoons and Kids

Robert Kraus was an author, illustrator, New Yorker cartoonist, and publisher who produced dozens of popular books for children.

 "I write books to console myself, to encourage myself, to encourage others," he said in a 1979 interview. By then he had written and illustrated more than 60 books, had created dozens of covers for The New Yorker, and had become a publisher whose titles won several Caldecott Medals. 

A native of Milwaukee, Wisc., he was born in 1925. While still a boy, he decided he wanted to become a cartoonist and sold his first work — to a barbershop — when he was 10. "The greatest compliment anyone can give you is to buy your stuff," he said. 

By the time he was a teenager, he was selling to magazines like Esquire and Saturday Evening Post. 

He studied at the Art Students League in New York, where in 1944 he met his wife, Pamela Vivienne Evan Wong, who was also a student. A year later, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he worked for 20 years and created more than 40 covers and hundreds of cartoons. 

While at The New Yorker, he also wrote and illustrated more than two dozen children's books — many reflecting happenings in his own life. “I wrote ‘Leo the Late Bloomer’ when I was having business problems,” he said. “I tend to write about problems — ‘Miranda's Beautiful Dream' was inspired by Martin Luther King.”

He wrote "Junior" and the "Spoiled Cat" to keep himself calm when his wife, Pamela, was in labor and he couldn't reach the doctor. 

He left The New Yorker in 1966 and founded Windmill Books, which published not only his own titles but also the work of such illustrators and authors as Jacob Lawrence, Whitney Darrow Jr., Edward Koren, Norman Rockwell, Mickey Spillane, William Steig, and Charles Addams. Within a year, the house had won a Caldecott Medal and over the years, published more than 200 titles on three continents. 

Kraus was known for his sense of humor. In the early 1980s, he wrote "101 Reasons Not to Have Sex Tonight" under the name, I.M. Potent, M.D., whom Simon & Schuster touted as "one of the leading authorities in the world today on not having sex." 

In 1983 he began a syndicated Sunday comic feature, called "Zap! The Video Chap," that was aimed at children addicted to the then-new phenomenon of video games. 

However, his main interest was always in children's books. "I never slant my books to children," he said in 1979. "My books are not sickening, cloyingly sweet, and they have a point. I'm not a person who likes to write a lot, and children's books are the ideal forum for my ideas." 

Among his last titles were "Mouse in Love," published by Orchard Books, and "Little Louis,

The Baby Bloomer," published by Harper Collins, both in 2000. Many of his books are still in print in 2016. 

The Krauses moved to Ridgefield in 1965, owning the 1896 Colonial Revival house at the southeast corner of Main Street and Branchville Road. Walking his pug named Hoover and carrying a shillelagh, he was a familiar sight along Main Street sidewalks for many years. 

He and his wife moved to New York City in the late 1980s, but "he always considered Ridgefield his home," one of his sons said. 

He died 2001 at a nursing home in Kent, Conn., at the age of 76. He is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery in Ridgefield beneath a stone that includes an illustration from his series of books about a character named Spider, with such titles as "How Spider Saved Santa Bug" and "How Spider Stopped the Litterbugs."

E. W. Kemble: 

He Pictured Huck

Like his friend and fellow illustrator Frederic Remington, Edward Windsor Kemble moved to Ridgefield from New Rochelle, N.Y., and wound up dying here not long afterward.

Kemble was born in California in 1861, a son of the founder of the first daily newspaper on the Pacific Coast. By age 20 the largely self-taught artist was living in New York City. In an era before photographs were used in periodicals, he worked as an illustrator at the Daily Graphic, the first illustrated daily newspaper in New York, and did drawings for other publications such as Life and Harper’s magazines — Life was published by Ridgefield’s John Ames Mitchell.

“While contributing to Life I made a small picture of a little boy being stung by a bee,” Kemble said in a 1930 interview. “Mark Twain had completed the manuscript of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and... casting about for an illustrator, Twain happened to see this picture. It had action and expression, and bore a strong resemblance to his mental conception of Huck Finn.” 

Still in his early 20s, Kemble was hired to illustrate Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, now considered one of the greatest American novels of all time. He went on to do other work for Twain, including Puddn’head Wilson.

His “understanding and sympathetic” portrayal of black Americans in Huckleberry Finn was considered remarkable at the time, his obituary in The Ridgefield Press said. However, he himself admitted he had known hardly any blacks, and that the model for Jim (and most of the other characters, including Huck) was a teenage white boy named Cort Morris, who would pull down a black wool cap over his face to create the effect of being black.

Other publishers were taken by Kemble’s portrayal of Jim and approached him to do illustrations for works about blacks. Kemble, who had never been south of Jersey City, decided he needed to learn more about his subject, and for many months lived on a cotton plantation in the South to gain firsthand knowledge. He wound up being commissioned to illustrate Uncle Tom’s Cabin as well as an early edition of the Uncle Remus stories. 

While his illustrations of blacks often displayed “great empathy,” they sometimes reflected “the most outrageous of stereotypes,” one biographer said.

Kemble also drew scores of political cartoons for newspapers and was so effective at it that President William Howard Taft once remarked that “Mr. Kemble and his satiric drawings were one of the few forces in the country that he feared,” The Press obituary said.

Kemble moved here around 1930 to live with his daughter on Wilton Road West, where he enjoyed gardening and gatherings with friends. He died in 1933 at age 72 and is buried in Mapleshade Cemetery.

Maurice Sendak: 

The Wild Things

When he moved to Ridgefield in 1972, Maurice Sendak had lived in New York City all his life, and had never needed a car.

“I’m a 44-year-old neurotic who just learned to drive,” he told a Ridgefield Press reporter sent to interview him that year. “Maybe you should warn them that I drive a green Plymouth.”

Six years later, as another reporter arrived to interview him, he asked apprehensively: “You’re not going to take pictures, are you? That means I’m going to have to shave. The guy who writes the kiddie books can’t have his picture taken if he doesn’t shave first.”

They were examples of the dry sense of humor of a man whose visions of fanged but eventually friendly monsters sparked a revolution in children’s literature. 

For more than 60 years — 40 of them in Ridgefield, Maurice Sendak wrote and illustrated books that have entertained children and adults alike, and challenged established ideas about what children’s books should be. The New York Times once said  Sendak’s work “has brought a new dimension to the American children's book and helped change how people visualize childhood.”

His more than 80 titles had sold over seven million copies worldwide in a dozen languages

by the year 2000. They included such classics as “In the Night Kitchen,” “Outside Over There,” and his most famous work, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Maurice Bernard Sendak was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1928 to Eastern European immigrants. He spent much of his childhood in bed, suffering from a variety of illnesses.
The family didn’t have much money and he didn’t have many friends besides his brother and sister. “He was an outsider at birth, as Christians nearby would remind him, throwing dirt and rocks at him as he left Hebrew school,” the Associated Press reported.

A gifted storyteller, his father entertained the children with often disturbing tales of the old country that frequently ended unhappily.

“These were the stories he told us before we went to bed,”  Sendak said. “No wonder I’m an insomniac. I didn’t know these stories were considered intensely inappropriate for children until I repeated them in school and was sent home to have my mouth washed out.

“Up until my generation, there was a soft innocence, a sweetness in books for children, which I thought was inappropriate. It had nothing to do with my childhood or other people’s as I saw it.”

Sendak’s experience growing up as a poor Jew in Brooklyn during the Holocaust profoundly influenced his life and work. The monsters in “Where the Wild Things Are” were inspired by relatives who’d fled the Nazis and come to live with his family in New York.
“They are my uncles and aunts, who poked us, pinched us, said absurd, patronizing things to us, took up all the room, ate up all the food,” he said.

As a boy Sendak read extensively, drew comic strips, and illustrated his older brother’s stories. He didn’t go to college and worked at a variety of odd jobs until he was hired in 1948 by the famous toy store, FAO Schwarz, as a window dresser. 

He studied at the Art Students League and was only 19 when he illustrated his first book, “Atomics for the Millions,” in 1947 (he did the book for his physics teacher in exchange for a passing grade and a small fee). However, later in life, Sendak confessed, “I was a very late bloomer as an artist. My students, at age 21, are much better technically than I was at their age.”

His break came in 1951 when he was commissioned to do the art for “Wonderful Farm” by Marcel Ayme. By 1957 he was writing his own books.

His many awards include the 1964 Caldecott Medal for the most notable picture book of the year. In 1970, he became the only 20th Century American to receive the Hans Christian Andersen Award in recognition of his entire body of work. In 1997, President Clinton awarded him a National Medal of the Arts in recognition of his contribution to the arts in America.

In 2009 President Obama read “Where the Wild Things Are” for the White House Easter Egg Roll. Yet, when it first appeared in 1963, “Wild Things” was greeted with as much controversy as acclaim. Many parents, teachers and librarians considered the story and artwork too scary for children. Some even thought the book could be psychologically damaging because young Max’s mother deserts him and he’s sent to bed to confront his nightmares alone.

But many child psychologists said the book helped express hidden childhood fears. 

The traditional Dick and Jane were no match for Sendak’s naughty Max, an AP writer said. “His kids misbehaved and didn’t regret it, and in their dreams and nightmares fled to the most unimaginable places.” Monstrous creatures were devised from his studio, but none more frightening than the grownups in his stories. 

“From their earliest years, children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions — fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can,”  Sendak said when he received the Caldecott Medal in 1964. “And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things.”

In 1978, his curmudgeonly side came out a bit as he told Burt Kearns of The Ridgefield Press: “I love as few children as I do adults. I don’t feel that I write for kids. I happen to write books that are seen as being meant for kids because I create talking animals and things like that. But my books are not children’s books any more than any other book is. I just can’t write in any other vein.”

He described his simple style as “a poetic book form. That’s the only form I’m interested in. There is a beauty in the short text poem. I try to keep it potent, short, and full of energy. The reason that children understand it is because they have no fear of symbolic language — they can grasp things. They never feel lost in something unless it’s meaningless, and then they just throw it off into a corner. Adults are afraid to do that because they have too many self doubts in enjoyment when they should be going by instinct.”

“There is a magic in childhood,” he said, “but I like to think that there is the possibility of something magical in every human being. We just allow it more in childhood.”

He added that he didn’t take a condescending approach to children, nor did he attempt to moralize. “Who am I to teach or preach?” he asked. “I aid and assist.”

He bought his 18th Century house on Chestnut Hill Road in an out-of-the-way part of Ridgebury because “I wanted the experience of working in a different place,” he said six years later. 

“My first experience of really being in the country was when I spent a wonderful summer  in Wales. That was very fruitful for me. When I was in my twenties, most of my vacations were spent in Cornwall. They were the best summers of my life. So when I was looking for a place to live, my first indication was to look around here. But I was really attracted to the house, and the house was attached to Ridgefield.”

He said “I don’t think that living in Ridgefield has actually influenced my art, but I guess that as I get older, my work will become more pastoral.”

Over the years his work expanded into the worlds of opera and ballet; he’s designed sets and costumes for several successful productions, including an opera of “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was also made into a movie.

He believed his art had always been deeply connected to the music he enjoyed. 

“Designing for operas is as close as I can get to pretending that I’m a musician,” he said at the time.

Sendak was a mentor to many.  Jamison Odone, a former Ridgefielder, was among the illustrators who felt his mentoring, inspirational influence. 

“I don’t think there are many people made like him anymore,” said Odone, who is now a university professor as well as a children’s book author and illustrator. “There were so many times he’d say to me, ‘I don't even know what I’m teaching you, if anything at all.’ But he didn’t have to be teaching. Just talking to him, and looking at his work — he moved so many.” 

Lynn Caponera, his longtime assistant, helper and friend, said years with  Sendak shaped her way of looking at the world. “Maurice has a way of mentoring people,” she said. “You couldn’t do anything without seeing an artistic side to it, with Maurice. He made sure you felt good about everything you did. If you were painting a wall or weeding — anything you were doing, whether you’d think it was a mundane task — he had a way of making you see it wasn’t mundane.”

Sendak established a program for children’s book authors and illustrators, published or unpublished, in which selected artists would live next door to his house and he would mentor their work. 

“It’s a very low key, loose relationship,” Caponera said in 2012. “That was really Maurice’s legacy of the last few years. He wanted to foster children’s book authors to keep doing what they do.”

In his final years, Sendak would often say he didn’t mind being old because the young were under so much pressure. He would speak about death and missing his late siblings and his longtime partner, Dr. Eugene Glynn, a children’s psychiatrist who died in 2009.

When he was 50 years old, Sendak told interviewer Kearns that he never planned to retire from writing and illustrating. “I’ll stop when I die,” he said. “But who knows? Maybe when I’m 65, the publishing world will decide to retire me and give me a Mickey Mouse watch. I’d like that, but I already have one.”

A few months before he died, he said, “I want to be alone and work until the day my head hits the drawing table and I’m dead — kaput.”  

Death, he said, meant “everything is over. Everything that I called living is over ... I don’t believe in heaven or hell or any of those things. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They’re nowhere. I know they’re nowhere and they don’t exist, but if nowhere means that’s where they are, that’s where I want to be.”

Sendak, who had been in poor health for several years, died of a stroke in 2012. He was 83 and had never stopped working. 

After his death the Maurice Sendak Foundation, which handles his estate, announced plans for a Sendak museum somewhere in Ridgefield. In 2015, there was talk of locating the museum in a former Schlumberger Research Center building on Sunset Lane that had been designed by the noted architect Philip Johnson. 

However, in January 2016, the foundation decided not to use the Johnson building and said it

would look elsewhere. In July it got zoning approval for an art storage building on Sendak’s 17-acre homesite. It allows the foundation to host up to six visitors once a week to do research. The building, holding Sendak’s drawings and artwork, was to be attached to the existing house.

A month later, a stretch of Route 35, Danbury Road, from Limestone Road north to Route 7, was officially designated the Maurice Sendak Memorial Highway. The designation was the result of efforts started by Jake Madeson when he was a sophomore at Ridgefield High School and fostered by State Rep. John Frey. 

“I wanted something that told every traveler who passes through town how much he meant to our town,”  said Madeson, a Sendak fan since he was a small child reading “Where the Wild Things Are.”

“That book was everything to me growing up,” he said.

Robert Fawcett: 

An Illustrator’s Illustrator

Throughout much of his career, Robert Fawcett was known as an “illustrator’s illustrator.” He did paintings for virtually every magazine of note in the country, illustrated books, and wrote about his craft — his book “On the Art of Drawing” (1958) was popular for years. 

In 1947, he and 11 other artists founded the Famous Artists Schools, headquartered on Route 33 in Westport (later the home of Save the Children). 

Born near London, England, in 1903, Mr. Fawcett came to Winnipeg, Canada, in 1917 with his family. His father, an amateur artist, passed on a love of art in his son. At the age of 14, Mr. Fawcett quit school to work for an engraver, soon moved to New York and earned enough money working in art studios to spend two years studying art at London University. 

He returned to the States in 1924 and at first viewed commercial art with youthful scorn, working at it only to earn enough money to live while doing “serious” painting. But his commercial work began to sell and he eventually became one of the most popular magazine illustrators in the country. 

In later life, he viewed commercial painting with more respect. “Art is where you find it,” he said, “and the open, acceptant mind will as easily find it in a modest effort in some remote corner of a publication as in the collections now presented in the popular art galleries. 

“When a patronizing layman says, 'You are a commercial artist,' I am sorely tempted to say, ‘Yes — like Rembrandt!’” 

A critic once wrote that Fawcett “brought a superb sense of composition to his magazine and advertisement work.” He gained a great deal of notoriety for creating detailed illustrations to accompany a series of Sherlock Holmes stories in Collier’s magazine.

He was a member of the National Academy of Design and a leading figure in the Society of Illustrators.

He and his wife Agnes came to Ridgefield around 1940. Over the years, he frequently participated in and commented on town affairs, often writing letters to the editors of The Ridgefield Press on politics, zoning, and the schools. 

He lived on Nod Hill Road until his death in 1967 at the age of 64. His former home is now part of Weir Farm National Historic Site.

In 2001, Mr. Fawcett became one of a half dozen Ridgefielders who have been commemorated on U.S. postage stamps. The 34-cent commemorative shows a picture of an old-time ice cutter and was used originally in a 1949 advertisement for Carrier Corporation refrigeration equipment.

Alexander Ross: 

Artist of the Clinch and Cover

Alex Ross was an artist of many skills. But to magazine editors in the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, he was the go-to man for a “clinch picture.”

Born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1908, Alexander Sharpe Ross came with his family to Wilkinsburg, Pa., at the age of five and spent most of his early years in western Pennsylvania. 

His talent for drawing was recognized early but he could not afford a formal art education and  was a largely self-taught artist. He did attend a year of night school in art at Carnegie Tech. 

Over his long career Ross became a versatile artist, working in a wide variety of media —

oils, watercolors, serigraphs, collages, pastels, halftones, acrylics on gesso, and stained glass. While he spent his later years doing “serious” art, he is most remembered today for his three decades of magazine illustrations. Many of his magazine covers reflect an idealized, upbeat, post-war America — not unlike the pictures of Norman Rockwell and Ridgefield’s John Atherton; the three artists together produced hundreds of Saturday Evening Post covers. 

Ross began his career as a commercial artist in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, doing mostly

illustrations for advertising.

His first big break came in 1941 when Good Housekeeping selected one of his paintings from a roomful of candidates to be a cover on its magazine. It was the start of a 12-year relationship with the magazine during which he painted 130 covers. He was typically paid around $1,000 per cover — about $10,000 in 2017 dollars.

His work also appeared on the covers — and inside — of Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s,

Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and Collier’s.

Often the covers included at least one of his four children, all of whom learned to model for him early on in their childhood.

Ross also became popular with magazine editors as an artist of “clinch” pictures to illustrate fiction stories. They depicted men and women in romantic positions, especially kissing. One writer

called them pictures “heavy with romance.”

He also did commissions. An assignment for the U.S. Air Force took him to Alaska, where he painted impressions of America’s frontiers, some of which are now in the permanent collection of the Air Force and have won several awards. In 1969 he designed a U.S. postage stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of professional.

Around 1965, with more than three decades of commercial art behind him, Ross was able to spent more time at fine art. 

“I became fascinated with French Impressionism,” he said. “After that, non-objectives occupied my interests — Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro, Calder. But I got away from these because I hate hard edges. Painting should have  some mystery about it.”

He developed what one writer called “an entirely different and refreshing style” and what he called “inventive realism.”

“My subjects are mainly flowers and dream-like human figures,” he said. “Flowers have

beautiful shapes that lend themselves to abstraction, and I incorporate new dimensions in them, using the essence of ‘flower’ from memory to create a whole gamut of emotions.”

By the 1960s, Ross had also become interested in religious art.  “It’s one of the most fascinating fields of creation I can think of,” he said in 1974. He illustrated three religious books, including “Saints: Adventures in Courage” in 1963 for Doubleday and Company. In 1976, he designed several doors with stained glass windows for St. Peter’s Church in Danbury.

He exhibited widely and won many awards. His work is in the National Academy of Design, the U.S. Air Force Art Collection, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Mattatuck Museum, and in many private collections.  Originals of his magazine illustrations can fetch thousands of dollars at auctions and sales.

Ross and his wife of 57 years, Helen, lived for nearly 30 years on Hawthorn Hill Road in Ridgebury. Their house had large windows and panoramic views 35 miles westward across the Hudson Valley. He died in 1990 at the age of 81.

As a youth, Alex Ross wanted to become not an artist, but a professional acrobat. For a while, he actually earned money with acrobatic performances. 

“I wanted to fly through the air with the greatest of ease,” he said in a 1970s interview. “When sailing into a high layout back somersault, I felt like a bird, an eagle.”

Harry Bennett: 

Artist of A Thousand Covers

Literally millions of people have seen hundreds of paintings by Harry Bennett, but few would know his name. Mr. Bennett, a Ridgefielder most of his life, was one of the most prolific paperback book cover artists in the United States and probably the leading painter of covers for Gothic novels — more than 800 of them during a 17-year period from 1965 to 1982 alone. 

“The Gothic presents a black and white world,” Mr. Bennett once told an interviewer. “There are the innocents, the dashing and the vulgar. A problem arises and is solved, good over evil — it’s as simple as that. But along the way, there is excitement, mystery, romance.” 

And all three qualities are seen in his covers, which have graced the  works of such authors as Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, Anya Seton, Susan Howatch, Jude Devereaux, and Martha Albrand. 

Harry R. Bennett was born in nearby South Salem in 1919. His father, a Ridgefield native with deep roots in the town, had died a few months earlier in the 1918 influenza epidemic. 

Harry Bennett came to Ridgefield when he was a year old, grew up on Gilbert Street, and was captain of the Ridgefield High School basketball team that reached the semifinals of the state championship in 1937. He was also president of the Class of 1937 at RHS.

During World War II, he was a major in the U.S. Army in the Pacific, and painted many of the battle scenes he saw. He also suffered a broken back in the war. Major Bennett earned a Bronze Star for his participating in the 1944 Battle of Hollandia, in which General Douglas MacArthur’s forces cut off the entire Japanese 18th Army in New Guinea.

After the war, he married Margaret Shean of Ridgefield. She encouraged him to attend art school and to follow his passion for painting.  He studied fine arts at the Institute of Chicago, and graphics at the American Academy of Art, also in Chicago, and began doing advertising art for Pepsi, Buick, and other national accounts in the 1940s. 

In the late 50s, he switched to books, and began creating covers for Ross MacDonald mysteries and in 1961, Gothics — his first, for Mary Stewart’s “Thunder on the Right.” By 1972, Gothic novels represented 25% of all paperback sales nationally, and hundreds of titles — some selling 15 million copies — bore Bennett covers. 

In all, he painting more than 1,000 book covers during his career, often using Ridgefield friends and neighbors for models in the pictures.

Some of his book work was far more sophisticated than Gothics. The New York Society of Illustrators awarded him a bronze medal for the ink paintings he created to illustrate a boxed collectors’ edition of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” published in 1966.

Mr. Bennett lived and painted for many years at the corner of Main and Pound Streets — a Victorian home that’s been turned into condominiums called “Bennett House.”

Around 1982, he moved west and painted expressionistic works from a studio overlooking the Columbia River in Astoria, Ore. He later moved to Maryland to be closer to his family, and died in 2012 at the VA Medical Center in Baltimore.  He was 93 years old.