A Christmas tree sits awaiting Santa, while mice party beneath the floorboards.
Children clamor aboard a horse-drawn sleigh.
A bright red candle burns, surrounded by greenery.
They are among the hundreds of illustrations Tasha Tudor (1915-2008) painted for Irene Dash Christmas card collections. And one of those original drawings is back in New England for sale by Cellar Door Books of Bow.
“Sassafras Hill” was illustrated for a 1958 collection of cards. The drawing shows three children accompanied one of Tudor’s mainstays – a corgi – getting the mail in the snow outside a farmhouse. The house was modeled on a Carter Hill Road home in Concord, which at the time was owned by Tudor’s close friends Doris and Donn Purvis.
Tudor used the Purvis house, both the exterior and interior, as a model for a number of Christmas cards and illustrations. In fact, she liked the house so much, her son Seth Tudor built her a mirror-image copy in Marlboro, Vt., where she lived until her death.
When the original cards were complete, Tudor’s publisher would send the originals back to her, then she often had them matted and sold them.
John Hare, who co-owns Cellar Door Books with his wife, Jill, said that each year, Tudor would do a series of 15 to 18 cards and send them to her publisher, who would narrow the selections down to a dozen or so to be printed and distributed.
Hare tracked down some 1,400 card designs Tudor illustrated over her career for a book he published six years ago, Christmas Card Designs of Tasha Tudor.
The “Sassafrass Hill” original is 4 inches by 7¼ inches and framed. Cellar Door Books is selling it for $4,100.
Tasha Tudor was born Starling Burgess on Aug. 28, 1915, in Boston to parents W. Starling Burgess and Rosamund Tudor. Though originally named after her father, he was an admirer of Natasha from War and Peace and his daughter was called Tasha after her. For her professional career, Tasha Tudor adopted her mother’s maiden name, which she legally changed to after her first divorce.
After her parents divorced when she was nine years old, Tudor moved to Redding, Conn., with her aunt.
Tudor married Thomas McCready in 1938. They had two children while living in Connecticut. That same year, she published her first book, Pumpkin Moonshine.
In 1945, after the success of her illustrated version of Mother Goose, Tudor and McCready bought a farm in Webster. There, they had two more children.
Tudor was fascinated by the 1830s and was an early adopter of the “back to earth” movement. She raised large gardens, cows, goats and chickens. She spun flax and made her own clothes.
Her children grew up without radio or going to the movies.
Tudor began creating Christmas cards in 1946 as a member of the American Artists Group and continued through the ’70s.
She illustrated nearly 100 books, some by other authors, like Louisa Mae Alcott’s Little Women and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, as well as her own stories, like Corgiville Fair.
In addition to her illustrative works, she was an avid gardener and miniaturist making dolls and marionettes. (She even made a movie of her dolls’ wedding in 1957 with director Nell Dorr.)
She lived in Webster, with a Contoocook mailing address, until 1971, when her son built her the house in Vermont, where she lived until her death.
John Hare was a librarian at Simpson College in Iowa when he first got bit by the bookselling bug. A colleague had some books about South Carolina, which were of no interest to him, but Hare said he decided to buy them and resell them.
It turned into Cellar Door Books that he named based on something his high school English teacher had attributed to Edgar Allen Poe, “cellar door” were the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Later, Hare became a librarian at NHTI and moved to Hopkinton. All the while, he was selling books on the side.
Eventually, his wife suggested that he focused on one author people were looking for rather than many, and offered Tudor as an option. Tudor is sometimes associated with Hopkinton since her mailing address in Webster had the same zip code as Contoocook.
Originally, they bought some books they thought were first editions, but because Tudor’s work was so popular, they were reprints.
So, like the compendium of greeting cards, Hare assembled a bibliography of Tudor’s books and their various reprints.
Since then, Hare has become a walking encyclopedia of Tudor facts
Do you want to know what Tudor’s great-grandfather did to earn the name “Ice King” and build a fortune? Hare can tell you.
What were the names of Tudor’s dolls and when were they made? He knows that, too.
How did she discover her love of Welsh corgis? Hare had that story as well.
(In case you’re wondering, the answers are: By shipping ice in hemlock sawdust overseas. There are a lot, but in Hare’s stock are Lucinda (1954) and Eufenia (1994). Tudor went to visit family in England after her first divorce and met corgis there. At one point, she owned 11 herself.)
For more information or to make a purchase, email john@cellardoorbooks.com or visit cellardoorbooks.com.