Around 1940, Gustaf Tenggren left the Disney Studios a changed
man. It’s said that he gathered together the paintings he had
created up to that point, piled them up in the street and set
fire to them. With this single decisive act, he marked a turning
point in his artistic career. He never painted in the classic
European book illustrator style again. He had resolved himself
to create a new style. I really don’t know what brought him to
that point. I’d love to know the full story. But you can clearly
see the sharp dividing line between old and new in his work. In
the first few years of the 1940s, Tenggren struggled to develop
a new way of painting- a simplified style that depended on
fundamental qualities like skillful composition, expressive
texture and unique color harmonies, rather than photo-realistic
detail and modeling techniques derived from classical easel
painting. This book, along with its sequel Sing For America and
the schoolbook reader Runaway Home would lead to the creation of
the very first Litt