Caldecott Medal
The award is named for Randolph Caldecott, a nineteenth-century English illustrator. Rene Paul Chambellan designed the Medal in 1937. The obverse scene is derived from Randolph Caldecott's front cover illustration for "The Diverting History of John Gilpin" (Routledge, 1878, an edition of the 1782 poem by William Cowper), which depicts Gilpin astride a runaway horse. The reverse is based on "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie", one of Caldecott's illustrations for the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence".
Robert McCloskey
McCloskey won a second Caldecott Medal in 1958 for "Time of Wonder". Meanwhile, he had been a runner-up in 1949 for "Blueberries for Sal", in 1953 for "One Morning in Maine", and in 1954 for "JourneyCake, Ho!", the latter written by his mother-in-law Sawyer. In a 1958 magazine article titled "Bob McCloskey, Inventor", another Medal winner Marc Simont observed that "[his] talent for devising mechanical contraptions is topped only by his ability to turn out books that carry off the Caldecott Medal."