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John Tenniel
Born
John Tenniel, chief cartoonist of Punch, drew the 92 illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and Through the Looking-Glass, cut into wood by the Dalziel brothers' engraving firm. Carroll was a demanding collaborator and the first printing was withdrawn over print quality. Tenniel's Alice, Mad Hatter and Cheshire Cat fixed how the characters look for every later version.
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Randolph Caldecott
Born
Randolph Caldecott's sixteen picture books of nursery rhymes and comic verses, printed in colour by Edmund Evans from 1878, made pictures move the story along instead of decorating it: a line of text, then a lively drawing showing what the words leave out. Maurice Sendak called him the inventor of the modern picture book, and America's top award for picture-book illustration, the Caldecott Medal, is named after him.
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Beatrix Potter
Born
Beatrix Potter self-published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1901 before Frederick Warne took it on, insisting on a small format that a child could hold. Her watercolours, based on close study of real animals and the Lake District, keep the creatures anatomically right even in waistcoats, which makes the danger in the stories feel real. Norman Warne, her editor, became her fiancé before his early death.
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Arthur Rackham
Born
Arthur Rackham's tinted ink drawings for Rip Van Winkle in 1905, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Grimms' fairy tales, with gnarled trees that have faces and spindly goblins, defined the look of the Edwardian gift book. New colour printing let his muted washes be reproduced faithfully. His creepy-lovely forests still shape how fairy tales are pictured, and influenced later artists from Disney to Guillermo del Toro.
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E. H. Shepard
E. H. Shepard sketched Ashdown Forest and Christopher Robin's real toys for A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books from 1924, and later drew The Wind in the Willows for its 1931 edition. His light pen lines leave white space around the figures, so the drawings sit inside the text and are part of the jokes, such as Pooh bumping downstairs behind Christopher Robin. His Pooh is the one most readers still picture.
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Jean de Brunhoff
Born
Jean de Brunhoff turned a bedtime story his wife Cécile told their sons into The Story of Babar in 1931, a large-format book with handwritten text and big, flat-coloured spreads that read like a stage set. He made seven Babar books before his death in 1937; his son Laurent continued the series. The colonial assumptions in the early books are now widely discussed alongside their artistry.
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Dr. Seuss
Born
Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Geisel, drew in a rubbery cartoon style honed in advertising. The Cat in the Hat of 1957, written from a limited word list after a challenge from his publisher, showed early readers could be wild and funny, and Green Eggs and Ham used only 50 different words. Some early books and wartime cartoons contain racist caricatures, and six titles were withdrawn by his estate in 2021.
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Garth Williams
Garth Williams drew the pictures for E. B. White's Stuart Little in 1945 and Charlotte's Web in 1952, then re-illustrated Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books in 1953 after travelling to the places she described. His soft pencil animals have expressive faces without becoming cartoons. His Golden Books with Margaret Wise Brown reached millions of American homes through supermarket racks.
More about Garth Williams9
Tove Jansson
Born
Tove Jansson, a Finnish painter, wrote and illustrated the Moomin books from 1945, with ink drawings full of dark forests, storms and odd, lonely creatures that give the gentle stories an undercurrent of unease. Her Moomin comic strip for London's Evening News from 1954, later drawn with her brother Lars, spread the characters worldwide. Her picture books such as Who Will Comfort Toffle? show her colour work.
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Ezra Jack Keats
Born
Ezra Jack Keats made The Snowy Day in 1962 with collage of patterned papers, oilcloth and spattered paint, following a small Black boy, Peter, through a city snowfall. It was one of the first mainstream American picture books with a Black child as an ordinary hero, and won the Caldecott Medal. Peter grows up through later books such as Whistle for Willie and Peter's Chair.
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Richard Scarry
Richard Scarry filled Busytown with pigs, cats and worms doing jobs, in books such as Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever in 1963 and What Do People Do All Day? Every crowded page is labelled and full of side jokes, like Lowly Worm in his apple car, so children can pore over it long before they read. The books teach vocabulary and how a town works through looking.
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Judith Kerr
Born
Judith Kerr, who fled Nazi Germany as a child, wrote and illustrated The Tiger Who Came to Tea in 1968, first told to her daughter, with calm, everyday kitchen scenes that make the tiger's visit funnier. The seventeen Mog the cat books followed. Her semi-autobiographical novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, illustrated with her own drawings, introduced many children to the refugee experience.
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Shirley Hughes
Born
Shirley Hughes drew ordinary British family life, untidy kitchens, wet parks and siblings, in books such as Dogger in 1977, about a lost toy, and the Alfie series. She sketched real children constantly and her loose, lively line shows what toddlers' bodies actually do. Her comic-strip picture book Up and Up, without words, showed young readers how to follow a story panel by panel.
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Maurice Sendak
Born
Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963 with his editor Ursula Nordstrom, lets the pictures grow as Max's anger grows until three wordless double-page spreads of the wild rumpus fill the whole book, then shrink back as he comes home. It was criticised at first as too frightening. In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There pushed picture books further into dream and fear.
More about Maurice Sendak15
Eric Carle
Born
Eric Carle, a graphic designer, made his pictures from tissue paper he painted himself, cut and layered into bright collages. The Very Hungry Caterpillar of 1969, with pages of different widths and holes the caterpillar eats through, was engineered with the Japanese printer who could make it, and has sold over 50 million copies. He earlier illustrated Bill Martin Jr.'s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
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Quentin Blake
Born
Quentin Blake's scratchy, fast pen-and-watercolour drawings for Roald Dahl from The Enormous Crocodile in 1978, then The BFG and Matilda, became inseparable from the stories, and he worked closely with Dahl on how characters should look. His own books, such as Mister Magnolia and Clown, tell stories largely without words. He was the first Children's Laureate, and the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration opened in London in 2026.
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Raymond Briggs
Born
Raymond Briggs used comic-strip panels in picture books for children and adults: Father Christmas in 1973 shows a grumpy Santa at home, The Snowman in 1978 tells its whole story without words in soft pencil crayon, and When the Wind Blows follows an elderly couple through a nuclear attack. The wordless Snowman showed how sequence and pacing can carry emotion on their own.
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Helen Oxenbury
Born
Helen Oxenbury illustrated Michael Rosen's We're Going on a Bear Hunt in 1989, alternating black-and-white and colour spreads so the family's journey through grass, river and mud has a rhythm the reader feels. Her board books for babies in the 1980s were among the first to show toddlers realistically. She also illustrated Alice in Wonderland and made There's Going to Be a Baby with her husband, John Burningham.
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Jerry Pinkney
Born
Jerry Pinkney painted rich, detailed watercolours over pencil for more than a hundred books from the 1960s, many with African American stories and folk tales, such as Julius Lester's retellings of Uncle Remus and John Henry. His near-wordless The Lion and the Mouse, in 2009, which won the Caldecott Medal, tells Aesop's fable through animal faces and gestures alone, a lesson in visual storytelling.
More about Jerry Pinkney20
Janet and Allan Ahlberg
Born
Janet Ahlberg illustrated the books her husband Allan wrote, including Each Peach Pear Plum in 1978, an I-spy game in which nursery-rhyme characters hide in each picture, Peepo! and The Jolly Postman, which has real envelopes with letters inside. Her detailed, warm drawings of postwar British homes reward searching and rereading. She died in 1994, and Allan later wrote with other illustrators.
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Anthony Browne (author)
Born
Anthony Browne, a former medical illustrator, paints precise, slightly surreal pictures full of hidden details, gorillas and visual puns, in books such as Gorilla in 1983, Willy the Wimp and Voices in the Park, where four characters tell the same walk in four different painting styles. His pictures often say what the text leaves unsaid, inviting children to read images closely. He was Children's Laureate from 2009 to 2011.
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Axel Scheffler
Born
Axel Scheffler, a German illustrator based in London, drew Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo in 1999 and their many later books together, including Room on the Broom, Stick Man and Zog. His bright, clearly outlined creatures with big eyes make the monster both scary and funny, and the pictures time the jokes to the page turns of Donaldson's rhymes. Their partnership is one of the most successful in modern picture books.
More about Axel Scheffler23
Lauren Child
Born
Lauren Child's Charlie and Lola books, starting with I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato in 2000, combine scratchy drawings with photographed fabrics, wallpaper and food, and let the text curl and tumble across the page as the characters speak. The mix of collage and type changed the look of British picture books in the 2000s. She was Children's Laureate from 2017 to 2019.
More about Lauren Child24
Jon Klassen
Born
Jon Klassen, a Canadian who worked in animation, made I Want My Hat Back in 2011 and This Is Not My Hat, which won the Caldecott Medal, with deadpan animals and muted digital and printed textures. The jokes depend on the picture contradicting the words, so children work out what has happened before the narrator admits it. He also illustrated Mac Barnett's Sam and Dave Dig a Hole and the Shapes books.
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