The Art of Nancy Ekholm Burkert

Nancy Ekholm Burkert drew slowly and published rarely, and this slim 1977 volume remains the only real gathering of her work — forty colour plates of an illustrator who treated children's books with the deliberation of a Renaissance draughtsman.

Edited by David Larkin for the Peacock Press imprint and issued as an original Peacock Press/Bantam paperback alongside a Harper & Row hardcover of the same year, it reproduces plates from Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach (1961), her first commission, the jacket for John Updike's A Child's Calendar (1965), Andersen's The Nightingale (1965) and The Fir Tree (1970), Edward Lear's The Scroobious Pip (1968), and the Caldecott Honor Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1972). Portraits for which she used her own children as models are included, among them a brush-and-coloured-ink profile of her daughter Claire. Michael Danoff, then a curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, contributes a long introduction describing her working method in detail.

Burkert (born 1933, Sterling, Colorado) studied at the University of Wisconsin and worked from Wisconsin for most of her career, producing only a handful of illustrated books over five decades, a body of work whose scarcity is inseparable from its finish.