Esphyr Slobodkina

Esphyr Slobodkina was born in 1908 in Chelyabinsk, in the Russian Empire, into a Jewish family. After the Russian Revolution, the family moved to Harbin in Manchuria, China, where she studied art and architecture. In 1928 she immigrated to the United States and enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York, where she met the painter Ilya Bolotowsky, whom she married and later divorced. In 1936 she was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, and her abstract paintings and collages are held in museum collections. Through the children's book author Margaret Wise Brown, she began illustrating children's books. Her own picture book Caps for Sale (1940), about a peddler who carries his caps stacked on his head and must outwit a tree full of monkeys who take them, became a classic that has never gone out of print. She wrote and illustrated other children's books as well. She died in Glen Head, New York, in 2002, and a foundation preserves her home and work.

Esphyr Slobodkina is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Born into a Jewish family in Siberia; her adult beliefs are not well documented. Source: Wikipedia