Elizabeth Orton Jones (1910–2005)

Elizabeth Orton Jones was born in Highland Park, Illinois to an artistic and literary family. Her great-grandfather Joseph Russell Jones was a friend of President Lincoln and U.S. Minister to Belgium under President Grant. Her grandmother Annette L.R. Jones was a professional pianist. Her father George Roberts was a violinist and her mother Jessie Mae Orton Jones was a pianist and writer. Elizabeth grew up in a household that valued music, art, reading, and imagination, where people from all walks of life and various nationalities and races came to visit and talk. After graduating from the House in the Pines boarding school in Norton, Massachusetts, Elizabeth entered the University of Chicago, where she majored in art, and also took a full course load at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She graduated with a Ph.B. degree in 1932, and later that same year earned a Diplôme in painting at the École des Beaux Arts in Fontainebleau, France. Elizabeth then studied in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and with artist Camille Liausu. It was during this period that she began drawing and painting children. After she returned to the USA, she had a one-woman exhibit of her color etchings at the Smithsonian Institution. For her debut children's book, Ragman of Paris and His Ragamuffins (1937), she created two little French boys named Mich and Tobie. In 1940, she began to work on the illustrations for her book Maminka's Children with Lillian and William Glaser in New Yokr, who used a special process of drawing on grained plate glass. The resulting illustrations were characterized by their vividness, delicacy, and rich detail.
Over the course of her career, Elizabeth wrote and illustrated about two dozen books, including books by other writers as well as her own. She collaborated with her mother on four books. In 1945, Elizabeth
won the Caldecott Medal for her artwork for Rachel Field's book Prayer for a Child. After moving to Mason, New Hampshire, she began an association with the Crotched Mountain Center, a rehabilitation community for disabled children, after being commissioned to paint several murals for the center.