Life In Brief

AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR

Babar author Laurent de Brunhoff, who revived his father’s popular picture book series about an elephant king and presided over its rise to a global, multimedia franchise, has died. He was 98.

De Brunhoff died at his home in Key West, Florida, after being in hospice care for two weeks, according to his widow, Phyllis Rose.

Just 12 years old when his father, Jean de Brunhoff, died of tuberculosis, Laurent was an adult when he drew upon his own gifts as a painter and storyteller and released dozens of books about the elephant who reigns over Celesteville, among them Babar at the Circus and Babar’s Yoga for Elephants.

He preferred using fewer words than his father did, but his illustrations faithfully mimicked Jean’s gentle, understated style.

The series has sold millions of copies worldwide and was adapted for television and such animated features as Babar: The Movie and Babar: King of the Elephants.

Fans ranged from Charles de Gaulle to Maurice Sendak, who once wrote: “If he had come my way, how I would have welcomed that little elephant and smothered him with affection.”

The books’ appeal was far from universal. Numerous critics called the series racist and colonialist, citing Babar’s education in Paris and its influence on his (presumed) Africabased regime.

“Babar’s history,” the Chilean author Ariel Dorfman wrote in 1983, “is none other than the fulfilment of the dominant countries’ colonial dream.”

De Brunhoff himself acknowledged finding it “a little embarrassing” to see Babar fighting with black people in Africa. He especially regretted

Babar’s Picnic, a 1949 publication that included crude caricatures of blacks and American Indians, and asked his publisher to withdraw it.

De Brunhoff was the eldest of three sons born to Jean de Brunhoff and Cécile de Brunhoff, a painter. Babar was created when Cécile de Brunhoff, the namesake for the elephant’s kingdom and Babar’s wife, improvised a story for her children.

“My mother started to tell us a story to distract us,” de Brunhoff told National Geographic in 2014. “We loved it, and the next day we ran to our father’s study, which was in the corner of the garden, to tell him about it. He was very amused and started to draw. And that was how the story of Babar was born.”

The debut was released in 1931. Babar was well received and Jean de Brunhoff completed four more Babar books before dying six years later, aged 37. Laurent’s uncle, Michael, helped publish two additional works, but no one else added to the series until after the Second World War, when Laurent, a painter by then, decided to bring it back.

De Brunhoff was married twice, most recently to the critic and biographer Phyllis Rose, who wrote the text to many of the recent Babar publications. He had two children, Anne and Antoine.

Born 30 August 1925 Died 22 March 2024