An artistic family in Albany
Born in Albany, New York, in 1891, Dorothy grew up with a painter for a mother, Ida Pulis Lathrop, and a younger sister, Gertrude, who became a sculptor. Both sisters took animals as subjects and became advocates for their welfare. Dorothy worked on paper, where a shift in the outline of a paw or the tilt of a head could carry a scene.
Knopf published her pictures for de la Mare’s fantasy in 1919. Further commissions included Rachel Field’s Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, told by a wooden doll. Her largest public distinction came in 1938, when Animals of the Bible, with passages selected by Helen Dean Fish, earned her the first Caldecott Medal for American picture-book illustration.
A forest seen from the branches
In the Knopf edition, animals cling to the upper branches of a densely drawn forest. Their outlines draw the eye toward an opening below. The composition gives the brothers’ journey a particular scale: a familiar movement, such as reaching for a branch, can take place in a landscape that seems to go on indefinitely. De la Mare supplied its vocabulary and characters. Lathrop decided what the forest would let a reader see.
