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Leonard Weisgard : Children's book artist and writer.

We've created this website to share the artwork and achievements of our father Leonard Weisgard. Enjoy!

Photographs from an exhibition of Leonard Weisgard's work in Tokyo.
"Vintage Picture Books from Foreign Countries"
Parco Logos Gallery, Shibuya Tokyo.
 
Exhibition of Leonard Weisgard's work in Tokyo.Vintage Picture Books from Foreign Countries.Parco Logos Gallery, Shibuya Tokyo July 31 to August 12, 2009
 
Exhibition of Leonard Weisgard's work in Tokyo.Vintage Picture Books from Foreign Countries.Parco Logos Gallery, Shibuya Tokyo July 31 to August 12, 2009
 
 
Margaret Wise Brown & Leonard Weisgard
The Caldecott Medal is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children published that year. Leonard Weisgard was awarded the Caldecott for his illustrations for The Little Island by Margaret Wise Brown.
 
Caldecott Acceptance Speech The Kingfishers from "The Little Island"
Winner of The Caldecott Medal
"I've tried to tell you how elusive, really as elusive as that little island, it is for me to talk of illustrating and book making. Who dares to explain the poetry of living and dying or the minds of little children?"
Acceptance Speech for Caldecott Award
Complete speech...
 

"There was no one like Leonard" 
by Ken Chowder
  There was no one like Leonard, even Leonard himself. Leonard was gracious and generous and beautifully well-spoken and -dressed; he was also reclusive and agoraphobic and capable of saying virtually anything, or nothing at all. He reveled in attention, and hated it. He loved conversation and adored people, then lived far out in the country (in two countries, in fact) where he saw very few of them. He was politically active for years, and hated politics. He worked like a dog for some 30 years, illustrating many hundreds of books and writing many more; then he simply stopped far before what one could call retirement, and spent about 25 or 30 more years not working much more than a stitch.
   
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Web work : A.W.  formlab.dk  SHSdesign

 
 

"Golden Legacy" by Leonard Marcus
  ”Leonard Marcus’ Golden Legacy is a lively, never-before-told history of a company, its line of books, the groundbreaking writers and artists who created them, the clever mavericks who marketed and sold them, and the cultural landscape that surrounded them.” (Diane Muldrow, Random House)
 
 
 
Leonard Weisgard is beautifully represented in this new book and his daughter, Abigail, contributes with an essay “ Reflections on a Golden Egg.”
 

"In Search of Margaret Wise Brown"
By Leonard S. Marcus
  In October 1982, I flew from New York to Copenhagen to interview Leonard Weisgard for my biography of his close friend and frequent collaborator, Margaret Wise Brown. At the time of our meeting, I had only recently begun researching Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon. I had been “passed on” to Leonard, who was retired and rarely granted interviews, by another of his (and Margaret’s) old friends, the illustrator Clement Hurd, who in turn had seen me on the recommendation of a third Brown friend who had noticed my Author’s Query in the New York Times Book Review.
 
  "The Little Island"

A biographer’s work is an incredibly chancy as well as absorbing, mystery-laden business: Had any one of the three friends broken the chain, I doubt I would have found the material needed to write my book, especially as Brown herself had died thirty years earlier, at the age of 42, of an embolism following routine surgery. Brown’s papers and effects had, in the mean time, scattered to the four winds.

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