"They found a spot in the shade of the settle", llustration for 'Calico Bush'

 

Allen Lewis

  1873 - 1957 (biography)

c. 1931  

two-color woodengraving 

5 7/8 x 4 1/2" image 

pencil, lower left 

ed. 100 

inscribed: "imp" after signature 

used as the frontispiece for Calico Bush by Rachel Field, 1931 

on ivory wove 

published 

artist 

20102 

$250.00 

This color woodengraving was one of four commissioned as illustrations for Rachel Field's book "Calico Bush", published in 1931. The image was the frontispiece for the book. This impression is one that the artist published in an edition of 100, signed and annotated "Imp". The text for this illustration reads, in part: "The cold was intense, but her blood was quick and the old homespun cloak and hood enveloped her warmly. There was no sound except her footfalls in the snow....She set down the half-filled basket of cones, folded her hands piously under the cloak and began the first simple little chant she had ever learned, 'Noel - Noel - Noel'". Her chant was answered in kind by the Native American brave visible behind the tree at the left. Rachel Field's most noted book, "Calico Bush" features a young French girl abandoned in the New World in the mid-seventeen hundreds who finds herself bound-out to a family who has recently bought a farm in the relatively wild lands of coastal Massachusetts. Marguerite is an outcast in this family, ridiculed for her French ancestry in a time when the French are considered as dangerous an enemy as the Native Americans. However, Marguerite proves herself to be an asset to the family on multiple occasions when she saves the children from harm, rescues the family animals, and keeps the Indians from attacking their house. "Calico Bush" is a charming novel of the birth of a country, showing the struggles of the early settlers through the eyes of a true, if somewhat unwilling, immigrant.