Photo by Courtesy Photo

Illustrator Tasha Tudor was shown at home with one of her beloved corgis.

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Whimsical children's book illustrator Tasha Tudor, who lived and worked at a farmhouse in Webster for about 25 years, died Wednesday morning at her picturesque home in Marlboro, Vt. She was 92.

Tudor published her first book, Pumpkin Moonshine, 70 years ago, and went on to work on nearly 100 more. One of her most famous is Corgiville Fair, about a family of Corgi dogs who walk on two legs and wear clothes. The vividly illustrated book begins like this: "West of New Hampshire and east of Vermont, there is a village." It was published in 1971, the same year Tudor moved west to Vermont.

She moved to a house built by her son, Seth, using only hand tools. It was modeled after a centuries-old home on Carter Hill Road in Concord, owned by her friends. Tudor wanted her house to feel like the 1830s, her favorite time period. She lived her life as if it were 100 years ago; she wore 1830s-era clothing, churned butter by hand, covered her land with gardens. She walked barefoot and shunned electricity.

Friends said Tudor, who also illustrated classic stories such as Little Women, The Secret Garden and The Night Before Christmas, was admired as much for her simple lifestyle as for her paintings.

"I think the real legacy of Tasha is going to be the lifestyle she chose to live and how she portrayed that in her art," said Richard Mori, a bookseller whose Milford shop Tudor visited twice in the 1990s.

Tudor was born in Boston in 1915 to a fairly prominent family. Her father was a successful inventor, and her mother was an artist. Her great-grandfather had been a shipping entrepreneur; known as The Ice King, he figured out how to ship ice to the Caribbean by packing it in sawdust so it wouldn't melt.

She was named Starling Burgess, after her father. But he soon gave her the nickname Natasha, after the heroine in War and Peace. Her name was eventually shortened to Tasha and she adopted her mother's maiden name, Tudor. She worked under the name Tasha Tudor even after she married.

Tudor married Thomas McCready in 1938, and the two lived in Connecticut. That same year, she published Pumpkin Moonshine, which she wrote and illustrated for McCready's niece. In it, his niece tries to pick a pumpkin to make a jack-o-lantern, but the pumpkin rolls away and she has to chase it.

Tudor had four children of her own in the 1940s: Seth, Bethany, Tom and Efner. In 1945, she used the proceeds from one of her earliest successes, Mother Goose, to buy a 1740s farmhouse in Webster. She raised her children there, and the house served both as her home and her drawing studio.

"She said she was usually sitting with a few (children) playing by her knees and one in her lap," said Natalie Wise, who has apprenticed with the Tudor family for two years and spoke for them yesterday.

The Tudor children show up often in Tudor's work - almost as often as her beloved Corgi dogs. She owned several during her life, along with other animals, including a pet crow named Edgar Allan Crow, a pet rooster named Chickahominy and many chickens, goats and pigeons. "From the time she was a little girl, she knew she wanted to live on a secluded farm surrounded by a menagerie," Wise said.

Tudor also collected dolls. In 1955, she held an elaborate backyard wedding in Webster for two of her dolls: Lieutenant Thaddeus Crane and Melissa Shakespeare. Life Magazine sent a photographer and the wedding was filmed. In the footage, Tudor's daughters and other little girls, all dressed in white dresses with crowns of flowers, carry the dolls on strings, like marionettes, to the tiny outdoor altar.

"She marched to her own drummer, and she developed the life she wanted to live," said John Hare, a retired librarian who runs Cellar Door Books in Concord and exclusively sells Tasha Tudor works. (next page »)