BECAUSE BARBARA

Mackenzie presents a picture book biography of children’s author Barbara Cooney.

“When she was a wisp of a girl, Barbara Cooney spent her summers in Maine,” the opening text reads, accompanied by an image of a blond, stick-legged Cooney looking out at a bright blue bay under a clear sky. This prefaces the evolution of her wild settings and love of travel, but there seems to be little to say about young, middle-class New Yorker Barbara, other than to note her desire to paint well, “like Mama”: “She went to school and came home and did her homework. Pretty soon she was all grown up.” Immediately after schooling, Cooney starts work as a children’s picture book illustrator, frustrated by publishers’ reluctance to print in expensive color. Her Massachusetts environs, including a barn door and chickens, inspires her first color book, Chanticleer and the Fox, which allows her to advance her artistic career and gives her license to work with a wider palette. Ewen’s illustrations echo Cooney’s, with lupins, natural landscapes, and penciled shading, though the colors are brighter, the botanical details less specific, and the domestic, cozy Americana depicted less mysterious than the evocative pictures or complicated worlds of Cooney’s own classics.

A tribute to a giant of children’s literature and an artist’s need to put color on the page.