Lot 139: GRAMATKY, BERNARD HARDIE AUGUST JR. 1907-1979. Archive of original illust

GRAMATKY, BERNARD HARDIE AUGUST JR. 1907-1979. Archive of original illustrations from the Weston Woods animated film Little Toot, being two watercolors (one a finished watercolor on a photostat) with 43 hand-colored mounted photostats of the original pictures (two on one mount) and two color photostats also mounted, plus title card with lettered acetate overlay, prepared by the artist himself for use in the Weston Woods film, most 286 x 356 mm, all but nine of the hand-colored photostats signed in full in ink below the image to the right, minor wear with some tears of protective tissue guards. Provenance: Mort Schindel. Little Toot is one of the most beloved children’s classics of the 20th Century. Few of its admirers are aware that author-artist Hardie Gramatky was in his own right a distinguished painter of landscapes and seascapes of the California School. (American artist Andrew Wyeth thought he was one of America’s greatest watercolorists.) His painting caught Hollywood’s attention and he was hired as a senior animator at the Walt Disney Studios. Here he worked on several of the Silly Symphonies shorts. He learned much from the weekly story conferences and the development of storyboards on how to tell a story visually, knowledge he freely applied to the production of his own picture books. After working for Disney for six years, he went out on his own and published Little Toot in 1939, the first children’s book issued by Simon & Schuster. (They later published such classics as Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline and Kay Thompson’s Eloise.) Little Toot is typical of the here-and-now picture books of anthropomorphic machines then being published, most notably Virginia Lee Burton’s Mike Mulligan and His Steam Engine also available in 1939. Little Toot became by far the most successful of Gramatky’s picture books; and he wrote and illustrated five more Little Toot titles. (He left the last, Little Toot and the Loch Ness Monster, unfinished at his death, but his wife and daughter completed and published it in 1989 to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the original Little Toot.) Walt Disney retold Little Toot in 1948 as an animated segment of Melody Time through a song sung by the Andrews Sisters. The original book contained limited color (only a few including the frontispiece was in full color) so when Morton Schindel of Weston Woods commissioned a new animated movie of the story for school use in 1965, Gramatky colored halftone photostats of his original illustrations with watercolor and gouache. He then signed these mounted photoreproductions in ink.