Although I have not been able to find the same amount of information that is available for some other Caldecott artists, I have uncovered enough to paint a pretty clear portrait of Dorothy Pulis Lathrop (April 16, 1891-December 30, 1980). Aside from winning the 1938 Caldecott for Animals of the Bible: A Picture Book, she was and artist and activist who expressed her love of nature through her art -- and while from the outside it may seem as if she mostly lived apart from the world, her work is really an expression of her feeling of oneness with it.
Who was Dorothy Pulis Lathrop, Illustrator of the First-Ever Caldecott Gold?
Internet search after Internet search is likely to reveal little more than what appears in The New York Times's 126-word obituary.
The brevity of the notice shocks me because the NYT seems able to make a story out of just about everything, so the fact that it only provides her age (89), her Caldecott accomplishment, her survivor (her sister Gertrude), her occupation, and educational background suggests that there are not many additional facts. Wikipedia's biography for her is only a bit more than twice as long as the NYT story, although it is at least accompanied by a 51-title bibliography, as well as some examples and links to her art, which is included in permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, William College Museum of Art, and the Huntsville Museum of Art. The biography also gives a little bit of detail on her successful partnerships with Walter de la Mare and Rachel Field, and notes that she was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1949. BrainPickings shows several examples of the results of her partnership with de la Mare, and more examples are available via WikiArt.
Likely, this lack of detail is partly why 50 Watts Books included her in the "Forgotten Illustrator" series, and the page devoted to her has some fantastic examples of her art -- as does the JVJ Publishing page devoted to her work. JVJ also has links to her acceptance speech and her sister Gertrude's biographical paper, both of which were published by Horn Book in Caldecott Medal Books: 1938-1957 (Eds.: Bertha Mahony Miller & Elinor Whitney Field).
Dorothy Lathrop as a Person and an Artist
Although the amount of biographical details available for Lathrop pale in comparison to what we are used to today for even people of minor note, there is enough in the available documents, I think, to give a strong sense of Dorothy Lathrop's character.
As JVJ notes, "Her mother was a painter, her grandfather owned a bookstore, and her sister, Gertrude, was a sculptor, so she seemed destined for a career in art and literature." This seems true from the details that both she and her sister provide. Gertrude describes her sister as a fanciful and somewhat fearless child who loved nature, believed in fairies, and "often looked through her small magnifying glass at a miniature flower, its detail too minute for the unaided human eye to see, and marveled as the high-powered lens revealed a beauty and perfection as lovely as any orchid."
While their mother's "enthusiasm and reverence for all things beautiful" seems to have dominated Lathrop's childhood, her father's practicality and mistrust "of art as a means of earning a living" won out at least temporarily, and she spent three years at Columbia Teacher's College and another at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She spent two years teaching art at Albany High School when another teacher's "crisp" remark -- "'You would be here if you could [draw like that]'" -- prompted her to take her chances as an illustrator. She eventually got a commission, but the publisher went bankrupt before she got paid.
After that, Knopf selected her to illustrate Walter de la Mare's The Three Mulla-Mulgars, and an illustrator was born. She also illustrated Rachel Field's Newbery-winning book Hitty: Her First Hundred Years as well as her own The Fairy Circus, a Newbery honor book in 1932. In fact, her sister notes that Dorothy authored several of her own books and "took all the English and writing courses offered" during college. Among her self-authored books is the 1951 Let Them Live, which her sister describes as an advocacy piece to protect "the creatures so hard pressed in a world which men feel belongs only to them." The passion Dorothy felt for this cause is beyond doubt, apparent even with a quick read of this book, which details the habits of more than 20 different animals as well as the contributions each makes to the ecosystem and the ways each has been affected by humans.
As Lothrop recounts the effects of everything from hunting for profit to agriculture, it is difficult to distinguish her main points from those of today's conservationists and environmentalists, all of whom would likely agree with her conclusion:
For all of us are earth creatures and all must live here together. We are the strongest. It is in our power either to destroy or protect the weaker ones. We have destroyed without mercy. Let us now protect with out strength those creatures that are left, and save their food, their homes, and their lives from those who would selfishly take all these away. For each creature loves its life as we do ours, It loves the earth and the sun and each new day.We must let them live or we shall be alone in a silent world, and lonely for the singing of birds and the flash of their wings, for the chirping of insects and the swift running of wild feet.
Together with her sister's recollections, these words suggest a strength and conviction that belies the rather sheepish opening to her Caldecott acceptance speech: "I can't help wishing that just now all of you were animals. Of course, technically you are, but if only I could look down into a sea of furry faces, I would know better what to say." Similarly, her recollections of the "repeated conferences with my editor while the book was being made" show something of the rebel. "I must have been a most ferocious child," she muses, "for those stories that were my special delight are much too dreadful to be given to children of the present day." Among these are the bears who devour the children who jeered at Elisha, the Gadarene swine, and Samson's "foxes with the burning brands tied between their tails."
I am sure that Lathrop was too smart and sensitive to believe that a children's book was going to feature such things -- and part of me wonders if such conversations even really took place. Nevertheless, Lathrop uses the conversation, whether real or fictional, to make a larger point about the violence to which children are exposed: "Who would have believed that those young beings whose weekly fare is the animated cartoon in which great wolves with wide open mouths and dripping jowls tower in relentless pursuit like the nightmare creatures of delirium until the blot out all else and engulf at least even the beholder -- who would have believed that those children would blench at the story of Elisha's two she-bears?"
Getting to Know Dorothy Lathrop Through Animals of the Bible
In discussing the animals that did make it into the Animals of the Bible, Lathrop cites only a few, and I think her commentary reveals a gentle soul and quirky sense of humor:
![“Leviathan,” accompanying Job 41:1-5, 9-10, 13-34, on page 29. From Lathrop’s acceptance speech: No present-day naturalist could describe an animal more minutely than leviathan is there [in Job] presented, scale by scale, and surely none could portray one with such grandeur. “He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: He maketh the sea like a pot of ointment . . . By his nessings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.” It was lucky that the description was so detailed, for no leviathan visited our shores to pose for me (Horn Book II, page 14).](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAc9lVzrsbLGJug82GAZKxRLvFUMieh7-H99a3KOpCluzW98TUZxYDLJkZmg0GUgf_IGXbs99UgLak0KSNkm7XXWBmq2M5OCPpGgqsKMUMTuKs1ic9OYrFCdHwAEVTAkyq7AtjJpq0xS-6/s960/AnimalsOfBible_Leviathan.jpg "Leviathan Depicted as a Giant Fiery Sea Serpent")
Lathrop closes here discussion of the book by discussing the closing image and passage:
For the sake of the child that I was, who wanted the foxes to escape the fire, and who hope that the hungry lions would be fed, though not with Daniel, and for the sake of all other children who love and cherish animals -- and are there many who don't? -- I am glad that we ended the book with the prophecy of Isaiah: "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them . . . They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea" (Horn Book II, page 15).
Although intended to depict Isaiah 11:4-9, the image could just as easily illustrate the "unity of all life" upon which Lathrop meditates for much of her acceptance speech -- a kinship with the world that she seems to have felt deeply:
In that deep silence in which drawings are made, [the artist] so projects himself into the personality of any living model before him, that he becomes strangely identified with it. He not only feels himself brother to this creature whose atoms are held together by the same mysterious force or vibration, not only feels the same life surging through them both, but such is his intensity of interest, he becomes that creature. Or, as the eastern philosophers put it, he "sees all creatures in himself, himself in all creatures (Horn Book II, page 11).
With these words in mind, perhaps everything knowable about this wonderful artist is right there before us in the works that she left behind.
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