Delightful details

Published May 12, 2010 at 8:36 p.m.
Mary Jane Begin’s wonderland realism at Providence Art Club
Mary Jane Begin’s exhibit “Back to the Future: From The Wind In the Willows to Willow Buds” at the Providence Art Club’s Dodge House Gallery showcases her child’s fantasy wonderland realism.

VIVID Begin’s As They Rounded the River Bend.

In 1908, Kenneth Grahame, a banker who had been penning stories on the side, published a book titled The Wind In the Willows. It was about a gang of forest critters acting like well-mannered Edwardian gentlemen bachelors puttering about the English countryside, and occasionally seized by a passion to drive one of those new-fangled motor cars at breakneck speed.

So, of course, it became one of the classics of children’s literature. Various artists have illustrated it over the years — but perhaps Ernest Shepard’s black-and-white line drawings for a 1931 edition are best remembered. Shepard, who also made the definitive illustrations for A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories, brought a rich naturalism (he may be one of the last great Western drawers of trees) combined with a sharp eye for gestures that bring out characters’ personalities — from Pooh’s stiff shuffle to the way the boy Christopher Robin slouches over the railing of a bridge to gaze below.

Enter Mary Jane Begin of Barrington. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and became an art editor and director for a New York textbook firm before returning to teach illustration at RISD in 1991. She has illustrated a number of children’s books featuring anthropomorphized animals, like The Porcupine Mouse (1988) by Bonnie Pryor; Little Mouse’s Painting (1992) by Diane Wolkstein; and Bethany Roberts’s A Mouse Told His Mother (1997). Then along came a commission to illustrate a new edition of The Wind In the Willows that was published in 2002.

Read more


Back | Read more at Providence Phoenix