Jean de Brunhoff

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.