Nostalgia for a painting I don't have anymore
, originally uploaded by AMK.
I haven't been on many neighborhood walks this spring and summer due to pregnancy blahs, but I've started taking a few walks lately. I missed out on the early season flowers, but luckily haven't missed out on the thistles.
Thistles always remind me of the Hans Christian Anderson story The Eleven Swans, about a princess whose eleven brothers were transformed into swans. She spins flax out of thistles and makes eleven shirts for them out of the flax, which will turn them back into princes.
The story captivated me not so much because of the story itself, but because the book I had was illustrated with such marvelous watercolors. I don't have that book anymore, nor can I find any evidence of that edition on the internet. I still remember a page with midnight blue sky and eleven swans flying through a pine forest. I loved that picture so much, I painted a copy of it in 7th grade which, like the book, I don't have anymore.
Comments
Makes me think of the N.C. Wyeth paintings illustrating books we read as kids; Howard Pyle's Book Of Pirates, The White Company, Greek myths, that kind of stuff.
Surely this is not the same, but it seems like a good time to recommend the Maria Tatar annotated fairy tales book (obligatory Amazon link). The stories are all there, plus highly interesting historical, sociological, and psychological notes on them. Very cool.
Posted by: sgazzetti | 3:19AM, 07.14.08
Added to wish list.
I have a small collection of folk and fairy tale books anyway, so this is right up my alley.
Posted by: andrea | 7:26AM, 07.14.08
Was this story sometimes also called "The Wild Swans"?
Posted by: Tracy | 4:43PM, 07.16.08
It's a good thing you just asked that. Because I googled "The Wild Swans", found a different version of the Hans Christian Anderson story than the one I linked above, and that version is much closer to the version I rememberd.
That led me to searching for illustrations from "The Wild Swans", which led me to this book illustrated by Susan Jeffers and I think it's THE version of my memory!
Thank you so much!!
(Also, an ironic note: In this version, she has to make flax out of nettles, not thistles, so I remembered it wrong to begin with!)
Posted by: andrea | 4:55PM, 07.16.08