Phoebe Erickson

Phoebe Erickson (1907–2006) was a children's book illustrator and author who is best remembered for her accurate depictions of wildlife and the natural world.

Personal life and education Phoebe Erickson was born on November 23, 1907, in North Bay, Wisconsin, the twelfth of Swedish immigrants Axel and Emelia Erickson's eventual thirteen children. She grew up on the family farm in Door County surrounded by animals and nature, something she later credited with greatly impacting the direction of her artistic career. In a 1952 interview with the Hartford Courant titled Children Find Charm in Phoebe Erickson's Yarns and Drawings, Phoebe described her childhood as follows:

After finishing eight years of local schooling, Erickson graduated from Bailey's Harbor School in 1921. She moved to Chicago to further her education by studying painting and design at the Art Institute of Chicago as a scholarship student from 1931 to 1933. In 1937, she again moved to New York where she would eventually attend Columbia University. Phoebe soon met trial lawyer Arthur Blair, and the two were later married in the Marble Collegiate Church.

Erickson and her husband spent their retirement restoring old homes in Spain and Sweden, before finally settling in New England. Phoebe Erickson died at her home in Concord, New Hampshire, on August 23, 2006, at the age of 98. She is buried near her hometown in Bailey's Harbor, Wisconsin. Career While attending the Art Institute of Chicago, Phoebe Erickson worked as a freelance illustrator for greeting card and playing card companies. One of the designs she created for the Arrco Playing Card Company, featuring two fawns in a forest, eventually caught the eye of a publisher at Children's Press and she was soon invited to write and illustrate an original children's book about foxes. She regularly collaborated with Thornton Burgess, a conservationist and prolific author of stories for children through the 1950s. Awards In 1957, Erickson's original book Daniel 'Coon: The Story of a Pet Raccoon won the William Allen White Children's Book Award. She became the fifth recipient of what is now recognized as the oldest children's choice book award in the United States at a ceremony held at the College of Emporia in Kansas City, Kansas, on October 10, 1957.

In 1948, one of Erickson's watercolor illustrations was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors, and Drawings.

Collections Phoebe Erickson's books continue to be held in numerous libraries and museums around the world. In 1954, she sent autographed copies of each of her books accompanied by some of her original drawings and paintings to the library she frequented in her childhood in Bailey's Harbor. She later praised the library in an interview given more than a decade later, saying "Much of my early education I owe to my parents, the rest to the public library."

National Trust Museum of Childhood, Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, UK. \ Thornton W. Burgess Museum, Sandwich, Massachusetts. Miller Art Museum, Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Phoebe Erickson Room, Bailey's Harbor Library, Bailey's Harbor, Wisconsin.