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Two illustrated pages for Mother Goose present an encyclopedia of inventive relationships between text and image. To accommodate the large number of texts beginning with the words "There was an old woman?" the illustrator selected and grouped four rhymes, and invented witty visual links between the individual illustrations. Sweeping lines and repeated forms unify the illustrations. The line of the hill behind the modest home of the old woman who lived under a hill becomes the top of a wall on the facing page. The shape of the tiny house and the angled picket fence of the old woman who lived under the hill reappears, like a bad dream, in the shapes of the exceedingly small dwelling of the old woman called Nothing-at-all, who is menaced by a man's advancing teeth. A big semicircle formed by the calf, the athletic old woman who sat spinning, and the roofed boot of the old woman who lived in a shoe leads the eye around the page and back to the startling image in the lower left side of the double-page spread. The dynamic image suggests that a swift move of the boot just might save one old woman from becoming a snack. Another wonderfully irrational visual relationship appears as the eye follows this curve. Because of the ambiguity of the white space, the figure of the old woman tossing the calf can be read as pirouetting on the grass or as falling onto the roof of the shoe house.
Although most of the illustrations for the 1936 edition were executed in black and white, the artist used diverse means to enliven his ink drawings. Arbitrary and visually exciting changes in point of view and scale of images underscore the childlike feeling of these pages.
The plain white background of the ink drawings also allowed the artist to
make changes without redrawing an entire piece. Duvoisin cut and pasted two
ink drawings and the second half of the page title to complete the design for
page 117, a technique that would be invisible to the camera.
Mother Goose: A Comprehensive Collection of the Rhymes. Edited
by William Rose Benét. New York: The Heritage Press, 1936
Illustrations for "There Was an Old Woman", pages 116 and 117
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Illustration for page 116
Ink, gouache, graphite, and collage on paper adhered to paperboard
13 x 10 inches
Gift of Louise Fatio Duvoisin
1986.1191.037
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Illustration for page 117
Ink, gouache, graphite and collage on paper adhered to paperboard
13 x 10 inches
Gift of Louise Fatio Duvoisin
1986.1191.083
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