Wild Things Exhibition Guide Reading Room (2024)

Final Art for I Saw Esau
1991
Watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

Mother Goose nursery rhymes were an important source for Maurice Sendak’s books. Their origins might have been political, satirical, or sexual, but today, their content can seem enigmatic and puzzling, which made them ideal material for Sendak’s illustrations. In 1992, he created a series of pictures for I Saw Esau, an anthology of traditional English children’s poems and rhymes written between the 1600s and 1800s.

Sendak’s frontispiece features a self-portrait (top right) and portraits of Sebastian Walker, publisher of the anthology (top left), and the editors, renowned English folklorists Iona and Peter Opie (bottom right and left).

Studies for Pincus and the Pig
2004
Watercolor on paper
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York: Bequest of Maurice Sendak, 2013. © The Maurice Sendak Foundation

In 2004, the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra collaborated with Sendak to create a radically new adaptation of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Sendak recast the familiar story into a Jewish fable about a boy named Pincus and a scary pig. He also provided Yiddish-accented narration to the orchestra’s Jewish folk-style music.

The Horn Book Poster (Caldecott)
1985
Poster
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

In 1985, Sendak created this cover for the children's literary magazine, The Horn Book (enlarged here as a poster). In his design, Sendak paid homage to Randolph Caldecott, seated and sketching, surrounded by a girl, a cat playing a fiddle (a reference to Caldecott’s illustration for “Hey Diddle Diddle”), a dog, and Moishe, Sendak’s Wild Thing alter ego.

New York is Book Country September 16, 1979
1979
Poster
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

New York Is Book Country

From the 1970s to the 2010s, Maurice Sendak made posters for New York Is Book Country, an annual book festival in Manhattan. Two shown here, from 1979 and 1988, feature a Wild Thing with recognizable icons of New York City, evoking King Kong—one of Sendak’s childhood inspirations.

Sendak’s 2003 poster honored New York City’s first responders who acted so valiantly during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Final Art for Dear Genius, The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom Cover
1997
Watercolor, pencil, and ink paper
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

Maurice Sendak worked loyally with a small number of editors. Ursula Nordstrom was the first and most influential. Nordstrom, editor-in-chief of juvenile books at Harper & Row Books from 1940 to 1973, also edited E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, and many other acclaimed books. Sendak recalled, “She treated me like a hothouse flower, watered me for ten years, and hand-picked the works that were to become my permanent backlist and bread-and-butter support.”

He created this portrait of Nordstrom for the cover of her collected letters, Dear Genius. Several of the letters in the book were written to Sendak, detailing the process of creating Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen.

Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water
1965
Book
New York: Harper & Row, 1965. © 1965 by Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak’s Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water were his earliest professional efforts to illustrate a Mother Goose rhyme. He wrote, “You have a nice little Mother Goose text that allows you to rearrange the characters in any way you like and make up . . . any story you want; it just has to spring from those words.”

Hector Protector was dressed all in green,
Hector Protector was sent to the Queen.
The Queen did not like him, no more did the King,
So Hector Protector was sent back again.

Final Art for Hector Protector
1965
Photo lithograph
© The Maurice Sendak Foundation

Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water was Sendak’s first publication after Where the Wild Things Are. Despite the enormous success of Wild Things, Sendak was not happy with the original book’s pale and untrue color reproduction. As a result, for his next publication, Sendak used a method called pre-separation, a laborious process that involved creating a printing layer for the black and white drawing and another for the painted color.

• Introduction / Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Reading Room
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Epilogue