This week we are featuring Tiger Flower, a tale for children by Robert Vavra with paintings by Fleur Cowles and a preface by Yehudi Menuhin. It was published by Reynal & Company in association with William Morrow & Company in New York in 1969. The book tells the story of Tiger Flower, King of the Grass, who lives “where everything that should be small, is big, and everything that should be big, is small.” Robert Vavra wrote the story after being inspired by Fleur Cowles’s paintings.
In an author’s note, Robert Vavra wrote:
“When I first saw Fleur Cowles’s paintings in London, I was convinced they would make wonderful illustrations for a book. They had a rare imaginative quality about them that filled me with instant enthusiasm for such a project. But Fleur is an internationally known painter, not an illustrator, and I knew that she, like many painters, might not consent to illustrating someone else’s ideas. So that same evening, not wanting to leave her creatures behind me forever, I proposed that she send me about eight photographs of paintings she had done. And because she has an adventurous spirit, one that knows few boundaries, she agreed.
In the months that followed, small packages of photographs of these paintings reached me in Spain. They came from collections in Greece and France and South America and Italy and the United States and many other places. Fleur did not have an easy job tracking them down. But she did it. Then, laid out on my work table, those that appear in this book rapidly fell into order. It was not the ordinary way of making such a book – illustrations before text. But then, Fleur’s tiger was not a very ordinary cat.”
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–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Intern
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