Illustrator, author Joan Walsh Anglund dies

Joan Walsh Anglund, a prolific children’s author who earned the devotion of millions of readers with her sentimental depictions of little ones, their features often reduced to their all-seeing eyes in illustrations that sought to capture the essence of childhood, died March 9 at her home in Litchfield County, Conn. She was 95.

The cause was a heart ailment, said her daughter, Joy Anglund.

Anglund produced more than 120 books that, translated into numerous languages, sold 50 million copies. No translation was needed for the emotion evoked by her illustrations, which became ubiquitous through their adaptation for greeting cards, calendars, figurines and other collectible merchandise.

Working in pen and ink, Anglund honed a signature style in which children’s round faces were rendered without mouths or noses. Much like children themselves, they were a tabula rasa, a screen on which young readers could project and try out their own new and unfamiliar emotions.

“I think perhaps I am trying to get down to the essence of a child ... of childhood itself, perhaps,” Anglund observed in reflections quoted in the reference guide “Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults.”

“This may be too why I find myself dressing the children in my books in a timeless manner,” she continued, “not really in any definite ‘period’ in time — but always with a vague sense of nostalgia.”

Her first book, “A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You,” was published in 1958 after her husband discovered the manuscript and submitted it to the Harcourt publishing house in New York.

She displayed particular skill in defining emotions in ways that children could understand — explaining, for instance, that love is the “good way we feel when we talk to someone and they want to listen and don’t tell us to go away and be quiet.”

Joan May Walsh was born in Hinsdale, Ill., on Jan. 3, 1926. Her father was a commercial artist, and her mother was a painter who sought to cultivate her daughter’s creativity by occasionally allowing her to play hooky from school.

Anglund recalled that, in their household, everyone drew on the porcelain table, on mirrors — everywhere. She absorbed a spirituality and love of the written word from her Catholic grandmothers, one of whom read to her from “Lives of the Saints.”

Anglund studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Academy of Art, also in Chicago, before working as an apprentice to a commercial artist.