Robert Lawson - 1943 Children's Book Artwork

Ever since I read "Ferdinand the Bull" as a kid, I was struck by Robert Lawson's lush approach to laying ink on paper. There are times when the work takes on the look of a woodcut, with how Lawson brushed his lines into the drawing. The thing is, you don't see many originals by Lawson. I can count on one hand the number I've seen over the past 40 years, and still have fingers leftover. So that makes picking a piece up by him quite special. This drawing is from "Adam of the Road", a 1943 book written by Elizabeth Janet Gray. The book won a Newberry Medal that year.

Scanning this piece was not easy, as I simply could not get the scanner to pick up the subtleties of Lawson's brush work. So I went with a cell phone pic instead, which captured the subtleties in better fashion. The piece in person is quite lovely, even if I can only see the details with a magnifying glass. And it's done entirely in brush and ink.