Children’s Books
two every day. She stopped writing in the
1990s, with the exception of four board
books recently published by Islandport.
“No more ideas,” says Ipcar. She has also
given up illustration, except for one new
one, her first in decades, of the letters X,
Y, and Z, “high in a tree,” for her Maine
Alphabet board book (2012).
“My mother always said, ‘Never get
involved with commercial art. They’ll
milk your brain dry,’” says Ipcar, adding,
“ I never felt that way about children’s
books. I always thought what I was doing
was fine art.” Certainly it has earned her
critical praise. In recent years, Dave Eg-
gers has been among those who cham-
pion her work. In 2009, when Islandport
reissued The Cat at Night (Doubleday,
1969), he called it “an underappreciated
classic.”
Becoming an Illustrator
Ironically, given her mother’s feelings
about commercial art, it was a friend of
her mother’s who gave the teenage Ipcar
her first book to illustrate, a story about
a colt. A few years later the librarian at
her high school, Anne Thaxter Eaton
(who later became co-editor of children’s
books at the New York Times Book Review),
encouraged her to show her portfolio to
publishers. “Nothing ever came of it, and
I can see why,” says Ipcar with the dry
humor that marks her conversation.
“They weren’t very salable. I’d go in, and
they’d say, ‘Oh, we don’t take fantasy.
This is one of our bestsellers,’ and they’d
pull a book of fantasy off the shelf.”
A few years later, in 1945, Ipcar’s il-
lustrating luck changed when a former
teacher, Ellen Steel, put her in touch with
William R. Scott. “[He] was starting out
as a publisher and trying to do new, mod-
ern books and get young illustrators that
he wouldn’t have to pay much,” says Ip-
car. Her first assignment was to illustrate
Margaret Wise Brown’s The Little Fisher-
man (1945). And she continued il-
lustrating and writing until 1986
and the publication of My Wonderful
Christmas Tree (Gannett Books). “ I
had other ideas I would have liked to
have published,” says Ipcar. “But I
would have liked to have [had] other
illustrators illustrating them.”
Altogether Ipcar wrote and/or illustrated 33 picture books and three
At the height of her career, Ipcar pub-
Dahlov Ipcar: A Maine Treasure
As recently as five years ago, when children’s author and il- lustrator Dahlov Ipcar (b. 1917) received the New England Independent Booksellers Association President’s Award for her body of work, some
in the audience asked, “Dahlov who?”
Thanks to the efforts of Islandport Press
and Down East Books, two publishers in
Maine, and Flying Eye Books, which has
offices in London and New York, the
97-year-old Mainer is poised for a comeback—and not just in New England.
Late last year PW spent an afternoon
with Ipcar at her home on Georgetown
Island, where she has lived and worked
for over three-quarters of a century. She
has seldom left, even to return to New
York City, where she grew up. Ipcar
missed the opening of her first solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in
1939, when she was 21. Among her rare
out-of-state trips was one to Minnesota
in 1998 to accept the Kerlan Award for
children’s literature.
Ipcar leads the way into the studio that
she and her husband, Adolph, added to
the farmhouse more than 30 years ago.
It’s a short walk from the summer home
that her parents bought in the 1920s.
Sculptures of Ipcar as a girl made by her
father, the sculptor William Zorach,
A fine artist and children’s book illus-
trator—her art is part of the permanent
collection of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the
Brooklyn Museum, among others—
Ipcar continues to paint for an hour or
B; J;;;;; R;;;;
Dahlov Ipcar, in a still taken from a 2013 documentary video called Creative Growth, which
she made with her son Robert Ipcar.
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