Elsa Beskow

Biography

Elsa Maartman got her first job as an illustrator by plucking up her courage: she went to the offices of the publisher Svensk läraretidning and offered her services as a draughtswoman. She was then studying at the Technical School in Stockholm, now Konstfack. From 1894 she made drawings for the children’s magazine Jultomten and for Christmas publications, and from the same year until 1897 she taught drawing at the Whitlock co-educational school, where Ellen Key also worked for a time.

She was born on 11 February 1874 in Stockholm, in Södermalm, in the parish of Maria Magdalena. Her father, the businessman Berndt Maartman, came from a family that had emigrated from Bergen in Norway; her mother, Augusta Fahlstedt, was a teacher. When her father died, Elsa was fifteen. Her brother was sent to be brought up by an uncle on her mother’s side, and her mother moved with her five daughters in with two unmarried sisters and a brother. The girl thus grew up in a household that lived on what the women earned. These aunts and the uncle are generally believed to be the models for the characters of her later books about Aunt Green, Aunt Brown, Aunt Lavender and Uncle Blue.

She married Natanael Beskow, a theologian and pastor who later became headmaster of a school in Djursholm; sources give different years for the wedding. From 1900 the family lived in Villa Ekeliden in Djursholm, built in 1890 for Viktor Rydberg. They had six sons, among them the painter Bo Beskow and the geologist Gunnar Beskow. She worked at home, with the children playing around her, and brought in a considerable part of the family’s income.

She made her first book, “The Tale of the Little Little Old Woman” (1897), from an old nursery rhyme she had heard from her grandmother. Real success came in 1901 with the verse tale “Puttes äventyr i blåbärsskogen” (“Peter in Blueberry Land”): a boy wants to gather baskets of berries for his mother’s name day, and the Blueberry King and his small helpers help him. The book was read to children throughout the twentieth century. Next came “Olles skidfärd” (“Olle’s Ski Trip”, 1907), “Tomtebobarnen” (“The Children of the Forest”, 1910), “Hattstugan” (“The Hat House”, 1930) and the five books about the aunts, which began in 1918 with the tale of Aunt Green, Aunt Brown and Aunt Lavender and ended in 1947 with “Petters och Lottas jul” (“Peter and Lotta’s Christmas”). A film and a television series were made from them. “Pelles nya kläder” (“Pelle’s New Suit”, 1912) tells city children how a sheep’s wool becomes clothing. In “Blomsterfesten i täppan” (“The Flower Festival in the Garden”, 1914) Swedish critics see a picture of a class society: weeds that threaten the peace of the garden, and a thistle that drives them back from the gate.

Plants in her books are always recognisable by shape and colour. The scholar Stina Hammar observed as early as 1958 that Beskow does not simply draw a spruce but the very spruce the story is about. The borders of her pages are often decorated in the Art Nouveau style. Her models were the English illustrators Randolph Caldecott and Walter Crane, and her pedagogical ideas about children and reading, in the view of Swedish writers, came first of all from Germany. The influence of Hans Christian Andersen and Zacharias Topelius is also commonly noted, and Beskow illustrated Andersen’s “Thumbelina” (1908). In all she published about forty books with her own text and pictures, and she also illustrated ABC books, songbooks and other people’s texts, including songs by Alice Tegnér, but she preferred to work on her own ideas. With Herman Siegvald she published a school reader, “Vill du läsa?” (“Do You Want to Read?”), in three volumes in 1935–1937. Opinion of her books has changed over time: they were reproached for an idealised bourgeois idyll in which the father of the family decides everything, but others noted that in the books it is the women who put things in order, and that the children are more independent and livelier than the upbringing of the day prescribed.

Elsa Beskow died on 30 June 1953 and is buried in the cemetery at Djursholm. Since 1958 the Swedish Library Association has awarded a prize in her name to the year’s best children’s book illustrator. On the square named after her in Djursholm stands a small bronze statue, and in the Junibacken museum in Stockholm one hall is devoted to her.