THE MODEST DUTCHMAN BEHIND MIFFY
Dick Bruna 1927-2017
Dick Bruna, who has died aged 89, created one of the most instantly recognisable characters in children’s literature, said The New York Times: the sparsely drawn white rabbit known in English as Miffy. Over half a century, Bruna wrote more than 120 children’s books – small and square, ideal for little hands – which sold some 85 million copies; he became the most translated Dutch-language author after Anne Frank, while Miffy – adored not just by children, but by art critics and designers, too – was featured on everything from key rings to posters. In 2015, Bruna’s work was the subject of an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and in his home town of Utrecht, there is a Miffy museum.
A chubby child, known to his family as Dikky (Fatty), Hendrik Magdalenus Bruna was born in 1927 into one of the Netherlands’ most famous publishing families. From early on, he loved to draw, and after the War, he lived briefly in Paris, where – spending most of his time touring art galleries – he was struck by the works of Picasso, Léger, Matisse and Braque. For a time, he aspired to become a painter himself, but decided he wasn’t good enough, and instead joined the family firm. He was ill-equipped to run the business, so his father set him to work producing covers for paperback books. His designs were cool and minimalist – his covers for Georges Simenon’s Maigret books featured just a pipe in silhouette – and were admired by Picasso.
He wrote his first book, The Apple, in 1953. Two years later, on holiday with his young family by the seaside, Bruna was inspired by the sight of rabbits hopping around in the dunes. He drew a lifelike rabbit, then pared the image down until only its essentials remained, and thus Miffy (or Nijntje, as she is known in Dutch) was born. The books were not an immediate hit. Parents, accustomed to traditional picture books, were put off by Bruna’s unadorned style. “They said, ‘Oh, that’s too simple. The colours are too bright and I don’t like blue and green together,’” he told The Guardian in 2006. “But I thought it was nice to make everything as simple as possible to give children lots of room for their own imagination.”
His instinct turned out to be correct. Toddlers responded well to the first two books, and scores more followed, all with simple stories (Miffy goes to school, Miffy visits a zoo) and a barely varying design: plain line drawings, set against bright blocks of colour. “Even Miffy’s face remains apparently constant, with black dots of eyes and a cross of a mouth, although occasionally there is an addition, such as a tear,” said The Guardian. But, by very slightly tilting her head, or slightly shutting her eyes, Bruna gave her “a full range of responses”. For him, the almost Zen-like simplicity of his drawing was paramount. “Miffy is always Miffy and a house is always a house,” he said. Yet he found drawing the little rabbit difficult and stressful. “With two dots and a little cross I have to make her happy, or just a little bit happy, a little bit cross or a little bit sad – and I do it over and over again,” he said.
Miffy became popular all over the world – and especially in Japan. Bruna became head of a £150m empire, and won countless awards and honours. But a kindly, modest man, who insisted he was not a proper artist (I can’t draw like “famous people do”, he once said), he continued to live simply in Utrecht with his wife Irene, whom he had married in 1952, and their three children. Every morning, he’d draw Irene a picture of something related to her day, then pedal off to his studio. “I just see it as a very ordinary job,” he once said. “There is nothing else I can do, apart from make little drawings and stories.”