And I Paint It
Henriette Wyeth's World
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
And I Paint It is a poetic picture-book biography about artist N.C. Wyeth’s daughter, Henriette—a talented painter in her own right—from award-winning creators, author Beth Kephart and illustrator Amy June Bates.
And I think of the girl I am and the girl I’ll be:
A painter, like Pa.
An actress (maybe).
A fairy with wings.
A father and daughter sneak away from their big, busy family to paint in the wild landscape. Together, they paint a lily, bright and white as a star; the green growing into the cap of a strawberry; the blue in the sky running pink. Henriette’s father is N.C. Wyeth, the famous artist, who encourages her to paint what she sees, to awaken into her dreams, and she does, in this poetic picture book inspired by a famous American family of artists.
“The prose is full of sensory description that captures Wyeth’s observations of her world. In wide double-page spreads, Bates re-creates the lush hillsides of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, crisscrossed with split rail fences and dotted with wildflowers.” —Horn Book
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A girl and her father, artists both, head out on a summer day to paint. Her poetic narration pulls the reader along, rendering in words what she experiences ("His big hand is red-and-blue-and-purple freckled,/ his old coat smells like apple cores and packing moss and turpentine") as well as her father's lessons in "sensing deeply" (" ‘Love the object for its own sake, Henriette,' Pa says,/ only to me,/ pointing to the flower,/ fine and lucky on its stem"). Kephart's afterword explains that the child protagonist is Henriette Wyeth (1907–1997), a noted artist and the daughter of illustrator N.C. Wyeth (1882–1945). Kephart's evocative text pairs dreamily with Bates's illustrations of fully realized, painterly images of Henriette and her father at work, collected artist notebook–style alongside small, finely rendered pencil sketches of items such as a scratching hen and a blackberry vine. A lovely foray into a painter's world. Ages 5–7.
