Disciplines: Visual Arts – painting

Esphyr Slobodkina

Disciplines: Visual Arts – painting
Residencies: 1958
Esphyr Slobodkina (1908–2002) was a popular artist, author, and illustrator, best known for her classic children's picture book Caps for Sale. Slobodkina was a celebrated avant garde artist and feminist in the middle part of the 20th century. In the late 1930s, Slobodkina began to write and illustrate her own children's books. Among her 24 published works Caps for Sale (1940) is considered a children’s book classic; it has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Caps for Sale won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958. Other children’s works include The Wonderful Feast (written in 1928, first published in 1955), The Clock (1956), The Long Island Ducklings (1961), and Pezzo the Peddler and the Circus Elephant (1967), reissued as Circus Caps for Sale (2002).

Studios

Alexander

Esphyr Slobodkina worked in the Alexander studio.

Funded through the generous support of Elizabeth Alexander, this studio was built in memory of her late husband, the renowned portrait painter John White Alexander (1856-1915). Originally designed as a visual art gallery, Marian MacDowell persuaded Elizabeth that the space would better serve the arts if commissioned as a visual…

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