(Continued excerpts from my upcoming biography of my mother, In Search of the Cat Lady.)

The New York Times: "Drawings in chalk, wash and other media introduce his majesty the cat in playful, predatory, sleepy and incalculably calculating guise...this week at the Arden Galleries.  Clare Turlay Newberry knows her subjects and personalizes them with sympathy, charm and almost uncanny skill."

"Mrs. Newberry, wasting no words but leaving out none beautifully lucid, puts her secrets at the disposal of old and young; she keeps back nothing--except the genius.  For it takes little less to make this animal come alive on paper…" The New York Herald Tribune

She next created a humorous book, LAMBERT'S BARGAIN, illustrated in pen and ink line drawings was published in 1941.

"The humor in this book is the wacky sort...It is fun to have this book--and we recommend it for its absurd fooling, which is deftly carried out." The Junior Reviewers

"The hilarious story of Lambert and his pet hyena...long popular with librarians who conduct story hours," commented The Horn Book, "but because the book was published originally during the war years, it was allowed to go out of print until reissued by its wise publishers…"

"Our family, had a personal perspective on LAMBERT because we knew that Henry, the disparaging hyena, was based somewhat on Clare's brother, Joe Turlay.  My Uncle Joe was also highly talented artistically as a child and went on to become a leading engineer, working on the first V8 engine in 1953 and the famous slant V6 engine of the early 1960's." (from my upcoming biography, In Search of the Cat Lady,(C)2003 Felicia N. Trujillo.)

My Mother's next book was awarded another Caldecott--MARSHMALLOW, published in 1942.  Reissued in 1999 by Smithmark in their Clare Newberry Classics series, MARSHMALLOW was also appreciated by a leading publisher in Japan, Kodansha which received Japan's highest honor for a children's book in 2003.

For more details on this book , please see the link for MARSHMALLOW on this site. My mother created and hand-lettered the original "marshmallowy" title script which later became a popular type style for the 1940's. In fact, it became so popular that a publisher decided they needed a "really retro" style and used another type for the title to reissue MARSHMALLOW.

In a rare response to Clare's popularity, Harper published a portfolio of her famous illustrations as large portraits suitable for framing in 1943. This included my mother's suggestions on the most effective way to frame them.

My mother was amazingly good at designing framing for artwork;Clare also hand-lettered every book title of her books, designing a new type style that would match the cover drawing, as well as the personality of the book's hero or heroine.

Her portfolios were created with that same exacting care and was so sophisticated in its design that even ten years later, in 1953, a fashion advertisement for a silver silk suit featured the model holding up my Mother's portfolio as the very essence of chic and classic design.

The portfolio, now a collector's item, included large (11 x 14 inches), expensively reproduced photograveure prints of the favorite illustrations from MITTENS, MARSHMALLOW, APRIL'S KITTENS, and BABETTE. There was also a surprise bonus, portraits of her ocelot, named Pounce. My Mother had actually finally realized her dream (begun with HERBERT) of having a pet wild cat in her own ocelot, Rufus Furrface.

In 1943, my Mother discovered a book that changed her experience of art for the rest of her life: THE NATURAL WAY TO DRAW, outlining a year of study in the approach of Kimon Nicolaides, still thought the most brilliant art teacher in the history of American art.

Clare's very next book, PANDORA, showed the quantum leap her work had taken after studying Nicolaides. Clare perfected using charcoal on velour paper, a new medium she developed to make cats so come alive on paper that they really seemed to ready to walk off the page.

The next Newberry book, THE KITTEN'S ABC, blossomed in full color and was featured on the New York Times Book List for 1948.

Done in watercolors, the illustrations used all of Clare's fluid lines AND her Turlay fondness for writing limericks.

Very few of her admirers knew that Clare did all her own lettering for the KITTEN'S ABC, as this was considered part of a classic artist's skills by all leading children's book authors, including MADELINE'S Bemelman and BARBAR's De Brunhoff, fellow authors with whom she enjoyed a long correspondence.

During Clare's pregnancy with me, she wrote and illustrated the still popular SMUDGE, which won the American Institute of Graphics Arts Award.

"Mrs. Newberry has surpassed even herself in these delightful, loveable illustrations of her cats and kittens from the day they were born," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle.