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| Petra Mathers | |
Petra Mathers, a celebrated children's book illustrator and author of more than 40 picture books, died February 6. She was 78 and died by suicide, together with her husband, Michael Mathers.
"They believed their marriage was the most complete relationship ever," Barbara Hansel, a friend and a former bookstore owner, told the New York Times. "They often said they could not live without the other. They did what we always knew they would do. It confirmed the truth of their marriage."
Petra Mathers's books include the popular Lottie series. Lottie's New Beach Towel was Book of the Year for I magazine, and Lottie's New Friend won the Silver Medal from the New York Society of Illustrators.
Noting that her "kindly, often bumbling animal characters were nonetheless quietly heroic and often risked much for love," the Times wrote: "With spare, naïve images rendered in ink, pencil and watercolor, Ms. Mathers's stories--whose subjects included a soulful museum guard (an alligator) who falls in love with the subject in a painting (another alligator) and a warmhearted chicken named Lottie and her best friend, Herbie, a duck--were just as sparely written, but imbued with sly humor and wit, captivating both her eight-and-under audience and their parents."
Her first book was Maria Theresa, the story of "a dreamy fowl who has all sorts of adventures." It was followed by three other titles before Mathers began her Lottie series in the late 1990s. When an interviewer asked why she focused on chickens, she replied: "I can make them move, draw them to express feeling. Lottie is my role model. Even though it seems that I am inventing her, she already exists in all of us when we are at our best."
Aunt Mattie Got Her Wings (2014), Mathers's final book, "foreshadowed one of her last acts, a decade later," the Times noted, adding: "Mattie is Lottie's beloved aunt; here she is 99 years old, and dying, and Lottie travels to the hospital to say goodbye. Aunt Mattie wakes up to greet her. 'They're expecting me upstairs, but I told them I was waiting for you,' she says. 'Oh Lottie, what fun we've had.' "
"And off Aunt Mattie goes. It's not clear where, but there's an airplane waiting for her--a flight on Out of This World Airlines--and lots of other chickens. Everyone looks pretty happy. Back home, Lottie finds a note waiting for her. 'By the time you read this I will be dead,' it says, 'and I imagine you're feeling a little down in the beak. That's why I'm writing this letter. I've had a long and happy life doing what I love best.' Aunt Mattie adds, 'Now it's time to make room for someone else on this earth.' "
Over the years, Mathers had donated much of her original artwork to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass. Nichols B. Clark, the museum's founding director and chief curator emeritus, called it "a natural fit. They both used humble animals to tell very big stories." Clark received one of her goodbye letters, in which she wrote of the pleasure she took in being part of the Carle Museum and included an unpublished manuscript and a generous check.
"Petra was really very important and not as celebrated as she deserved to be," said Anne Schwartz, her longtime editor. "Each book is a slice of life beautifully captured, a little gem. She was a keen observer of the minutiae of the world around her, the small dilemmas of life. And she was a romantic to her very bones."