Eric Carle: Raining Cats & Dogs
Animals are a constant source of comfort and fascination—the ones in the wild and the ones we live with in our home.Eric Carle
Cats may have been Eric Carle’s favorite animals, but he loved dogs too! These furry friends appear in some of his most popular books like Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and The Very Lonely Firefly. Carle found opportunities to include cats and dogs throughout his children’s stories and in his independent art. On view for the first time is Carle’s playful collage of juggling animals created for the 2003 annual White House Easter Egg Roll and his 2004 image of a guitar-playing cat for a Dutch Children’s Book Week poster. There are other surprises too. Look for Carle’s blue cat, polka dot dog, and animals in costumes.
This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Hsin-Yi Foundation.
What to Expect
Visitors will view nearly 50 original artworks by Eric Carle, as well as rarely seen photographs and collages of his beloved pets. Guests are invited to curl up in a cozy “Kitty Corner” with one (or more!) of Carle’s books. Or they can visit the “Bark Park” to draw pictures of their pets or favorite neighborhood animals.
Departing from his traditional collage style, Carle combined linoleum prints with photographs in his alliterative alphabet book, All About Arthur. This illustration—and its accompanying linoleum cut—shows a “dapper dancing dalmatian dog.
Norton Juster, author of the classic book The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), shares his love of word play in Otter Nonsense, an amusing collection of 80 animal puns. Carle’s black line drawings playfully complement Juster’s witticisms.
Carle’s book Hello, Red Fox is about opposite, or complementary, colors. After staring at the blue cat in the book, readers shift their eyes to a blank white page where a ghostly orange cat appears! This “after image” is an optical effect demonstrating color opposites (it requires bright light and may not work in our dim gallery).
In Today is Monday, Carle illustrates a popular folk song about the days of the week and animals with their favorite foods. This is the final image in the book, inviting “All you hungry children / Come and eat it up."
Carle’s longtime Dutch publisher Hens Gottmer invited Carle to illustrate this poster for the annual Children’s Book Week celebration in the Netherlands.
The White House Easter Egg Roll is an annual tradition dating back to 1878. Carle attended the event in 2001 and, two years later, was invited to design its poster, He featured President George W. Bush’s pets—Barney the Scottish terrier and India the black shorthair cat—in a playful pyramid with the Easter bunny.
