ORIGINAL ART OF TASHA TUDOR
Tasha Tudor was a prolific artist. There is no count of the number of pieces she
created in her 92 years. I once
calculated that she may have painted or drawn as many as 15,000 pieces of
art. Her earliest published art consists
entirely of watercolor paintings as seen in Pumpkin
Moonshine, Alexander the Gander, The County Fair, A Tale for Easter, Snow
Before Christmas, The White Goose, Dorcas Porkus, and Linsey Woolsey. Beginning with Mother Goose (1944) Tudor provided black and white pencil
illustrations in addition to the charming watercolors which people already knew
and loved. Christmas card illustrations
date from the 1940s. And there were always
incidental paintings - little things used to fill the corner of a page, or
perhaps a small illustration for an endpaper.
Edward B.
Hills and his niece Gretchen McKeever accounted for 1152 items in a rare
booklet they published in 1975. A Partial List of Original Water Colors,
Drawings, Oils, and Pastels by Tasha Tudor, Together with the names of the
owners of most of the pieces lists individual paintings by book and page on
which they were reproduced. In most
cases, Hills and McKeever list the owner of a piece in 1975. This booklet is one of the most difficult
pieces of Tudor bibliography to locate. This
is because it wasn't sold; it was largely donated to major research libraries so
that the information would be part of the public record for Tudor
research. Try your state university to
find a local copy.

Many pieces of Tudor art were never sold by Hills; their
ownership wasn't tracked through his Dutch Inn Gift Shop. This includes some pieces from the 1940s and
1950s that Tudor sold to collectors directly from her home. And of course, Hills wasn't present for the
last 35 productive years of Tudor's life. There is no list of all that later art. In addition to her contract book art with established publishers, Tudor
also created separate work for a variety of groups either as a gift or on commission. Examples of the latter are a pastoral print
painted for the Chester, Pa., SPCA. Corgi Kisses, Megan's Market and Blowing Bubbles were individual
paintings commissioned by The Corgi Shop in Lanesboro, Mass. Tasha's
Herb Garden was a gift to the National Herb Garden located at the National
Cathedral in Washington, DC. There was a
bookplate commissioned for a Pennsylvania lady, although that was done in the
1960s and is recorded in Hills and McKeever's booklet. A
Partial List ... also records a rare oil portrait that Tasha painted of her
daughter Efner.
A form of Tasha Tudor's original art seldom seen appears in
individual letters to correspondents. She was fond of adding a drawing to a letter - a sketch of a child, or
perhaps some busy corgi dogs. Such
drawings can also be found added to books, often with personalized dedications
to a friend or collector. Then there are
the large sketch sheets Tudor created at public speaking engagements. These charcoal drawings on inferior newsprint
were sometimes auctioned at the end of a public appearance allowing several
collectors to take home Tudor art for a moderate price.
A future scholar will clearly need to research and consult a
vast trove of art to describe Tasha Tudor's life oeuvre. Harry Davis in The Art of Tasha Tudor shares a
tantalizing piece of Tasha Tudor history. He tells of her burning old, unused - and in her eyes - inferior pieces
of art.
Several years ago the Norman Rockwell Museum exhibited the
most comprehensive viewing of Tudor art to date. The exhibit consisted of more than a hundred
pieces of original art as well as crafts such paper boxes and clothing. The exhibit later toured to museums in
Michigan, Missouri and Louisiana. The show
was an introduction to the incredibly rich art in which Tasha Tudor shared
her view of a beautiful flower-laden world!