Tibor Gergely, Vintage Art Etching Farm with Cow and Farmer, Famed Children’s Book Illustrator, c.1940s

Medium: Etching
Surface: paper
Country: United States
Signed in plate with initial G.

Black and white illustration of a landscape with farm, farmer and cow.

TIBOR GERGELY
Budapest, Hungary, b. 1900, d. 1978
Tibor Gergely (1900-1978) was an artist and Illustrator.

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1900, he studied art briefly in Vienna, Austria, before emigrating to the United States in 1939, where he settled in New York City. Largely a self-taught artist, he contributed several covers to The New Yorker magazine during the 1940s.
Among the most popular children’s books Gergely illustrated are The Happy Man and His Dump Truck, Busy Day Busy People, The Little Red Caboose, The Fire Engine Book, Tootle, and Scuffy the Tugboat. Many of his better known books were published by Little Golden Books and a selection of his work was published as “The Great Big Book of Bedtime Stories.”
Gergely died in 1978, in New York.
As of 2001, Tootle was the all-time third best-selling hardcover children’s book in English, and Scuffy the Tugboat was the eighth all-time bestseller.
In 1955, Gergely received a Caldecott Honor for Wheel on the Chimney, written by Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon. He illustrated more than seventy Golden Books, including The Great Big Fire Engine Book, The Taxi That Hurried, Daddies, The Merry Shipwreck, Seven Little Postmen, The Happy Man and His Dump Truck, Animal Orchestra, and Animal Gym. Along with Dr Seuss, Maurice Sendak and Eric Carle he is consistently ranked amongst the best children’s book illustrators of all time. In 2007, Gergely’s work was celebrated in Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children’s Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became an American Icon Along the Way, by Leonard S. Marcus. Currently, many of Gergely’s original illustrations are touring nationally in the largest public showing ever of original art from Golden Books: “Golden Legacy: Original Art from 65 Years of Golden Books”. This exhibition from the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature continued through 2012.