ARTalk: Randolph Caldecott, The Man Who Could Not Stop Drawing, with Leonard Marcus

Most people know the name from a gold sticker on a book cover. Almost nobody knows the man.

This illustrated talk introduces the sly, iconoclastic Victorian whose kinetic drawing style and keen feeling for life ended in the invention of an art form the world has thoroughly embraced: the children's picture book. Randolph Caldecott worked in an era when the steam engine was driving an industrial revolution and train travel was blowing apart people's sense of space and time, and he was inspired to capture action, movement and speed in a way no children's book had managed before. He is the illustrator Beatrix Potter and Maurice Sendak revered most.

Leonard Marcus is a historian and the author of more than twenty five books about children's books and the people who make them. He contributes frequently to the New York Times Book Review, is a founding trustee of the Eric Carle Museum, and has curated exhibitions at the New York Public Library, the National Building Museum and the Norman Rockwell Museum.

Good to know. Registration is required and closes at 2:00pm, as the talk begins.

Where to go. The Main Program Room.

Check before you go. Ridgefield Library does not publish a price for this program. Confirm the cost and registration details on the venue's event page before you plan around it.