Sarah and Simon and No Red Paint - Hardcover

Edward Ardizzone

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0440076099 ISBN 13: 9780440076094

Publisher: Doubleday, 1966

Synopsis

Sarah and Simon live with their father and mother and their baby brother in a big room called a studio. Their father is an artist, and he is busy painting his masterpiece. When it is finished, they will become rich and famous, but in the meantime they are poor, yet very happy. Then one day their father runs out of red paint - and there is no money to buy any more. So Sarah and Simon set out to find some...Edward Ardizzone (1900-79), the acclaimed master of children's book illustration, brings all his skills to bear in this classic and endearing tale, which has been unavailable for over forty years.

About this title

About the Author:

Edward Ardizzone, born in 1900 in French Indochina, became a war artist during World War II. He illustrated more than twenty children's books including classics by Dickens, Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas and Christianna Brand's Nurse Matilda series.

Review:

The cross-hatched ink and sepia-washed drawings in Edward Ardizzone's newly republished "Sarah and Simon and No Red Paint" (Godine, 48 pages, $17.95) evoke another lost era, that of Britain in the early 1960s. In a pleasantly old-fashioned story that begins with struggle and ends with redemption, we meet two children who live with their mother, their baby brother, and their father, a painter, "in a great big room called a Studio." Though loving, the family is poor, for it seems that when the painter refused to renounce art and embrace business, his rich Uncle Robert had cut him off without a farthing. Willingly, Sarah and Simon help their parents make do: They wash their father's brushes, sit for portraits, run errands. Their favorite refuge is a shabby second-hand bookshop, whose owner lets them read all they like in exchange for doing a bit of dusting. So when their father runs out of red paint--and money--just as he is completing his masterpiece, it is to the bookshop that the children run. And it is there, after overhearing their anguished conversation, that a crusty old customer decides that he will reveal himself not only as an artistic well-wisher but also as . . . Ah, but that would be telling. --Wall Street Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1966
• ISBN 10: 0440076099
• ISBN 13: 9780440076094
• Binding: Hardcover