Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Little Known Fact: Maurice Sendak wasn’t always a bearded old man with glasses living in a house adjacent to a New England woods. Indeed, he was once a young artist living in a sparsely furnished New York apartment studying the masters and making dummies out of trim scraps. True!

That’s from a 1966 Weston Woods video. You can watch the whole thing in its entirety here. It’s worth because it gives a unique view of Sendak who is usually remembered as the grumpy grandpa of picture books.

People often paint Sendak as a curmudgeon but tell me this, what curmudgeon accepts a handmade decoupaged magnetic memory board with this amount of grace?

To further prove my point, here’s a picture of Maurice Sendak goofin’ around on a pedal boat.

photo from the Francelia Butler Papers, University of Connecticut

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