Picture Book Monday: A White Heron
May. 19th, 2025 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI’ve read Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron” before, but when I saw that Barbara Cooney had illustrated it, of course I had to pick it up. Sarah Orne Jewett was a writer of the “local color” school famous for her works set in Maine, while Barbara Cooney was an illustrator who spent her childhood summers in Maine and eventually settled there.
The pairing is propitious. Cooney draws out the twilight loveliness of Jewett’s story, Sylvia driving the cow home in the dusk, meeting a young man in the woods who is hunting birds for his collection, rising before dawn to climb the highest tree in the forest to seek out the home of the rare white heron for him… standing near the top of the tree, gazing out over the treetops to the vast sea “with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it,” and the birds flying below her. Hawks, sparrows, and the heron itself, which perches on a bough of Sylvia’s own pine tree.
But though the text describes the heron perching, in the pictures it is always shown in flight.
In the illustrator’s note at the back, Cooney notes that she wanted to capture “the superimposed layers of countryside and trees separated by rising mists or incoming fogs… something like an ethereal Japanese screen,” and YES, that is exactly the feeling that her landscape images often give. It’s especially present in this book in the last large picture, four shouting catbirds perched on a branch that spreads across the top of two pages, and in the misty distance below soft gray pines… and a few sharp black pines closer… and the white heron flying past.
I feel that this comment has unlocked something that I’ve responded to in Cooney’s illustrations without ever putting a name to it. I want to revisit some of my favorites now and trace this Japanese influence in her work.
The pairing is propitious. Cooney draws out the twilight loveliness of Jewett’s story, Sylvia driving the cow home in the dusk, meeting a young man in the woods who is hunting birds for his collection, rising before dawn to climb the highest tree in the forest to seek out the home of the rare white heron for him… standing near the top of the tree, gazing out over the treetops to the vast sea “with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it,” and the birds flying below her. Hawks, sparrows, and the heron itself, which perches on a bough of Sylvia’s own pine tree.
But though the text describes the heron perching, in the pictures it is always shown in flight.
In the illustrator’s note at the back, Cooney notes that she wanted to capture “the superimposed layers of countryside and trees separated by rising mists or incoming fogs… something like an ethereal Japanese screen,” and YES, that is exactly the feeling that her landscape images often give. It’s especially present in this book in the last large picture, four shouting catbirds perched on a branch that spreads across the top of two pages, and in the misty distance below soft gray pines… and a few sharp black pines closer… and the white heron flying past.
I feel that this comment has unlocked something that I’ve responded to in Cooney’s illustrations without ever putting a name to it. I want to revisit some of my favorites now and trace this Japanese influence in her work.
