Ezra Jack Keats

•Reproduced with permission of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation

One of the things I love the most about teaching is that it's such a great motivator to expand my own knowledge of the rich history of illustration. Every time I look at my notes for the session of my class that deals with the history of the subject, I find about ten-gazillion illustrators, printing processes or other things related that I want to know more about and pass onto my students. This time around I did a little bit of research on Ezra Jack Keats. These two sites here and here have been helpful for me; one of them being the Ezra Jack Keats foundation which also shows a photo sequence taken of a little boy.. who was the inspiration for Keat's most famous Peter Stories. I love that they put this piece of inspiration up on the site because it demonstrates so clearly and perfectly how whole entire stories can be crafted out of images.

A couple of these images are taken from a fantastic blog I just found which is all about Vintage Picture books. The blog is called "My Vintage Book Collection in Blog Form" and here is a link to it. Thanks Mallory for scanning these for us! :)