The Storks, A Party of Children Were Playing. Andersen’s Fairy Tales. New York, 1945.
SZYK, Arthur. The Storks. Signed and Dated “Arthur Szyk N.Y. (19)45”. Illustration for “The Storks” in Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Pen and ink and pencil on paper. Sheet size: Image size: 7″ x 5 1/2″. Image size: 4 3/4″ x 5 1/4″. Very Good condition.
This original drawing by Arthur Szyk was reproduced as an illustration for “The Storks,” one of the stories included in the American edition of Andersen’s Fairy Tales published in 1945. Szyk created many fanciful and winsome pictures for that collection. In this picture, the amusingly acerbic expressions of Szyk’s characters demonstrate the artist’s prodigious talent for bringing emotion and interaction to life.
In the story by Andersen, a family of storks nesting on the roof of a house encounters children gathered on the street below. The family hears one boy taunt their fledglings with the prospect of death, but another boy, named Peter, refuses to harass them. The mother stork counsels her offspring to pay the children no mind and instead to learn how to fly. When the fledglings have grown and learned to fly well enough for their winter migration, the old notion of storks’ delivering newborns takes a surprising turn. The fledglings take human infants from a pond and present them as siblings for those children who did not taunt them, but they carry a dead infant to the boy who terrified them. Finally, the same fledglings deliver both a sister and a brother to the good boy Peter, who protested the scaring of the storks.
Szyk’s illustration of this story shows a large timber-framed house to the upper-right-center of the picture. This structure takes on a magical quality from its many windows that are framed by shutters decorated with hearts. A chimney and a gable rise pleasantly from the roof, and the stork family’s nest rests on a platform at the peak. An oversized, fierce father stork stands to one side of the nest and peers down skeptically at several children in the street in front. Four fledglings face in the same direction, while their mother stares off to the right with a look of concern. A wide-eyed cat playfully attempts to climb onto the roof from the rear of the house, and a small garden stuffed with tall flowers and surrounded by a picket fence occupies the ground at the right. A church with spires, several other houses, and graceful pine trees dot the background.
In the street fronting the house, three children have taken up a position directly opposite the storks’ nest. There are two boys, who stand, and a girl in pigtails, who sits with the palms of her hands placed firmly on the ground. A dog waits behind them, and a hen stands a short distance away on the right. The bigger of the two boys stands in front with his face upturned and his right hand held out, as if in a rude gesture pointed at the birds. The smaller boy behind him faces the same way but keeps his hands in his pockets and appears to be silent. These portraits, both of the children and of the storks, offer ample proof of Arthur’s Szyk’s facility for conveying attitudes and feelings through his art. The sharp, clean lines of this scene, as well as the quiet perfection of the setting as composed by Szyk, make this original drawing a prime example of a master illustrator’s spectacular abilities.
Provenance: Parke Bernet Sale, New York, Mrs. Arthur Szyk, November 24, 1961. Lot 12A.
Publishing History: Andersen’s Fairy Tales. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1945.
