The Circus

Brian Lawrence Wildsmith (1930 - 2016) was a British painter and children's book illustrator. He won the 1962 Kate Greenaway Medal for British children's book illustration, for the wordless alphabet book ABC. In all his books, the illustrations were usually as important as the text. Wildsmith is considered as one of the greatest children's illustrators. The British Library Association recognized his first book, the wordless alphabet book ABC (Oxford, 1962); with the Kate Greenaway Medal for the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject. Four of his works were subsequently commended runners-up[a] for the Medal, all published by Oxford University Press: Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Edward Blishen, 1963; The Lion and the Rat: A Fable, by Jean de La Fontaine (1668), adapted from Aesop, also 1963; Birds, 1967; and The Owl and the Woodpecker, 1971. Each page of Birds illustrates a term such as "gaggle of geese". The Owl and the Woodpecker is a story both written and illustrated by Wildsmith. The biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award conferred by the International Board on Books for Young People is the highest recognition available to a writer or illustrator of children's books. Wildsmith was one of two runners-up for the inaugural illustration award in 1966 and one of three runners-up in 1968. In 1994 a Brian Wildsmith Art Museum was opened in Izu-kogen, in the south of Tokyo, Japan. About one and a half million people visited an exhibition of his work in 2005. Eight hundred of his paintings are on loan to the museum.