Ilon Wikland

Biography

She made her first test drawing for Lindgren for the book “Mio, My Son”. Sources differ on when this was: by one account Wikland came to the publisher Rabén & Sjögren in 1953, by another she was twenty. Lindgren had just finished the book, looked at the drawings and saw that this young woman could draw fairy tales.

She was born Maire-Ilon Pääbo on 5 February 1930 in Tartu. Her father, Max Pääbo, was a civil engineer; her mother, Vida Pääbo-Juse, graduated from the Pallas art school in Tartu and worked as a painter and textile artist. When the girl was eight or nine, her parents separated, her mother went to study in Italy, and Ilon stayed in Haapsalu with her paternal grandparents. She began school in Tallinn, but from 1939 to 1944 she attended the first primary school in Haapsalu. In 1944, when the Red Army came into Estonia again, the fourteen-year-old Ilon left for Sweden with the family of a classmate. In Stockholm she lived in the flat of her aunt, Valentine Pääbo Laroche, who was herself an artist. Through her aunt’s acquaintances Ilon was admitted to the School of Book and Advertising Art, where from 1944 to 1946 she studied under Akke Kumlien. Later she took classes at Signe Barth’s painting school (1952–1953 and 1956) and made many study trips around Europe. An early book with her drawings, a collection of English nursery rhymes in Swedish translation by Folke Hellgren, came out in 1948 under the name Ilon Pääbo.

Her first official work for Lindgren was “Mio, My Son”, published in 1954. The list then grew long: “The Six Bullerby Children” (she did not take part in the chapters previously illustrated by Ingrid Vang Nyman), “The Children on Troublemaker Street”, “The Brothers Lionheart”, “Karlsson-on-the-Roof”, “Mardie”, “Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter”, “Seacrow Island”, “The Ghost of Skinny Jack”, “The Dragon with Red Eyes”, “I Want a Brother or Sister”, “Brenda Helps Grandmother” and “Simon Small Moves In”. Lindgren worked with no one as often as with her. Wikland also illustrated books by Edith Unnerstad, Rose Lagercrantz, Ann Mari Falk, Mark Levengood, Marita Lindquist and Hans Peterson, as well as a collection of Sunday school songs and a sex education book for preschool children.

When drawing, she spends a long time looking for models. The shaggy robbers of Mattis’s band in “Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter” she found, by her own account, in the queue at the state liquor store Systembolaget, and Karlsson she spotted at the Les Halles market in Paris. She often drew her own daughters for her books. Of Lindgren she has said that her writing constantly makes her see inner pictures. Her works are held by the Gothenburg Museum of Art, the Nationalmuseum, the Postmuseum and the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, Mölndal City Museum and Kulturen.

She described her childhood in the book “The Long, Long Journey” (1995), written with Rose Lagercrantz; in spring 2017 it was staged as a children’s opera at the Royal Opera in Stockholm. In the picture books about Sammeli she wrote the text as well as drawing the pictures. For the ferries of the Tallink company she painted the hull and the children’s playroom of the ship Victoria I, and in 2004 she christened it.

In the same year, 2004, Wikland decided to give about 800 original book illustrations to Estonia. On 1 July 2009, in an old house belonging to the county museum in Haapsalu, the centre “Ilon’s Wonderland” opened: her drawings are on display, Karlsson’s room has been recreated, and there are a workshop, a stage, a fairy-tale well and a cinema room.

Awards: the Elsa Beskow Plaque (1969), the Expressen newspaper’s Heffaklump (1986), the Astrid Lindgren’s World scholarship (1988), the Estonian Order of the White Star, third class (2001), Illis quorum (2002), the Nacka Culture Prize (2003), the City of Stockholm’s Honorary Prize (2014) and the Swedish Publishers’ Association’s Honorary Prize (2018). In Estonia she is an honorary citizen of Haapsalu (2010). She lives in Stockholm.