The Books
My Dog is Lost!, published in 1960, was Ezra’s first attempt at writing his own children’s book, co-authored with Pat Cherr. The main character is a boy named Juanito, newly arrived in New York City from Puerto Rico, who has lost his dog. Speaking only Spanish, Juanito searches the city and meets children from Chinatown, Little Italy and Harlem. From the beginning, Ezra cast minority children as his central characters.
Inspiration for Peter
Two years later, Ezra was invited to write and illustrate a book of his own. This was the first appearance of a little boy named Peter. Ezra’s inspiration was a group of photographs he had clipped from Life magazine in 1940 depicting a little boy about to get an injection. “Then began an experience that turned my life around,” he wrote, “working on a book with a black kid as hero. None of the manuscripts I’d been illustrating featured any black kids—except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along. Years before I had cut from a magazine a strip of photos of a little black boy. I often put them on my studio walls before I’d begun to illustrate children’s books. I just loved looking at him. This was the child who would be the hero of my book.”
In the ’60s
The book featuring Peter, The Snowy Day, was awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1963, the most distinguished honor available for illustrated children’s literature at the time. (Ezra’s Caldecott Acceptance Speech). Peter appears in six more books, growing from a small boy in The Snowy Day to adolescence in Pet Show!
The techniques that give The Snowy Day its unique look—collage with cutouts of patterned paper, fabric and oilcloth; homemade snowflake stamps; spatterings of India ink with a toothbrush—were methods Ezra had never used before. “I was like a child playing,” he wrote of the creation process. “I was in a world with no rules.” After years of illustrating books written by others, Peter had given Ezra a new voice of his own.
In subsequent books, he blended collage with gouache, an opaque watercolor mixed with a gum that produced an oil-like glaze. Marbled paper, acrylics and watercolor, pen and ink and even photographs were among his tools. The simplicity and directness of The Snowy Day gave way to more complex and painterly compositions.
In his evolution from fine artist to children’s book illustrator, Ezra applied influences and techniques that had inspired him as a painter, from cubism to abstraction, within a cohesive, and often highly dramatic, narrative structure. His artwork also demonstrates an enormous emotional range, swinging from exuberant whimsy to deep desolation and back again.