Marie A. Lawson

Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, told and pictured by E. Boyd Smith (Houghton Mifflin, 1906) Grand in scope and exquisitely drawn, Smith’s second children’s book—after The Story of Noah's Ark (Houghton Mifflin, 1905)—cinched his reputation as one of America's foremost illustrators for young people.

Smith arrived on the scene at a time when library service to children was a new, distinctively American invention, and when the leading figures in the field were just beginning to do everything within their power to encourage artists, writers, and publishers to create for the nation's children original books to rival those being imported from Europe. His sweeping, frieze-like panoramas suggest Smith’s determination, in particular, to take on the great French artist Maurice Boutet de Monvel, whose epic Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc, 1896) represented a high water mark of achievement in the genre for critics on both sides of the Atlantic. That Smith nearly succeeded in his quest to match de Monvel’s masterpiece seemed proof enough to many of his generation that the picture book as an art form might indeed have a very bright future on these shores.… (mehr)