Eric Rohmann

y first view of this gentleman’s work was on the cover of Publishers Weekly, seven years ago or thereabouts. Alfred A. Knopf was publishing a book of mine which they called The Golden Compass (the British title was Northern Lights), and they’d paid to have it featured on the cover of that magazine. I arrived in New York for a pre-publication tour, and there was my publisher holding up Publishers Weekly to show the title of my book against the background of the most amazingly beautiful painting, which, as I say, I’d never seen till that moment.

“Who did that?” I said.

“Eric Rohmann,” said Simon Boughton proudly.

He might as well have said “Theophrastus von Sparkenpumpe.” I’d never heard of him.

“Well, he’s very good,” I said.

“I’m glad you said that,” said Simon, “because you’re going to meet him tomorrow.”

What would have happened if I’d hated it, I never found out. But there was no chance of my hating it. The cover designed by Mr. Rohmann (I’m going to call him that from now on, because he is very respectable now) showed the face of the young heroine, Lyra, as she sat on the back of the armored bear Iorek Byrnison, with her dæmon Pantalaimon in the form of a mouse close by. Mr. Rohmann had done something miraculous with Lyra’s face. The story depicts her poised between childhood and adulthood, on the very cusp of adolescence — and poised between several other things as well. She is very definitely a girl, and her world is a more traditionally run place than ours; but she’s also what used to be called a tomboy. Mr. Rohmann’s picture shows her exactly balanced between a past and a future, between safety and danger, between one world and another, between a thousand possibilities in one direction and millions of possibilities in another. It’s a face full of dreams and full of wonder. It is Lyra as she truly is, better than I could ever have hoped to see her pictured.

So I was prejudiced in favor of Mr. Rohmann even before I met him, which I did in Chicago at a dinner (that tour was full of fancy dinners where I met lots of very nice booksellers and tried to engage their interest in a book that wasn’t even published yet) to which he, Mr. Rohmann that is, had traveled a long way by train, and in his fine, modest way he traveled home by train as well, even though most artists of his distinction would merit a limousine.

I was glad to be able to pay tribute to him in the few clumsy and nervous words I spoke at that dinner. And I am even more glad to pay tribute to him now that his genius has been recognized with the highest honor the American book world can pay to its illustrators. Setting aside my personal esteem for the gentleman, which is unbounded, I have to say that as a worker in line and shape and color he is unsurpassed. (I shall have more to say about lines in a couple of paragraphs.)

The first book I saw that was illustrated throughout by Mr. Rohmann was King Crow, by Jennifer Armstrong. King Crow abounds in sweeping panoramas, dramatic compositions, and beautifully rich and glowing colors; but what stood out at once for me was the draftsmanship. Anyone who can get a dog to look like a dog, a crow to look like a crow, or a hand to look properly articulated with an arm that in turn fits onto a shoulder that in turn looks as if it has a proper structural relationship with a backbone — is someone who deserves respect.

(It strikes me that “the toe bone’s connected to the . . . foot bone, and the foot bone’s connected to the . . . ankle bone, and the ankle bone’s connected to the . . .” is a good description of the ideal curriculum for a life drawing class.)

Anyway, I’ve tried drawing those things myself, and it’s hard. When you look at a page of Mr. Rohmann’s work, you see not only the expression of a great innate talent but also the consequence of solid work and study and thought. I mean toil, the daily engagement with the tools, the never-ending struggle to make two dimensions represent three, the fresh-every-day effort to persuade the color to flow where you want it to and to preserve its warmth and brilliance all the way through the printing process.

Take Mr. Rohmann’s The Cinder-Eyed Cats. The story is a charming fantasy — a dream, really, all moods and wishes. The success of it was always going to depend on the quality of the pictures, but there was no risk that it wouldn’t succeed. Mr. Rohmann’s command of the medium had reached the point where he was able to draw any animal, from any angle, doing anything. As for the color, the whole book is suffused with a warm tonality that glows off the page: the tints are exquisite. Look at the various kinds of white he finds for the clouds on the spread beginning, “Quiet now the sea-blue sky. . . . ” Look at the colors in the morning sky: a perfectly controlled wash of tints from lemon to lavender, so that wherever you look on the page you know that it’s right — but you can’t see how he’s done it.

What it produces in the reader is a sense of effortless control, the experience of watching a technique so perfect that it seems to be just happening, as a bird sings. It isn’t, of course, but that’s what it seems like.

Not many lines, though. I do like lines.

And then came My Friend Rabbit.

At first glance, you wouldn’t think these pictures were by the same hand at all. Instead of the beautifully smooth and modulated painted surface of his previous work, here was a heavy, chunky, thick black line printed from a relief block. The man was carving this stuff. Not only carving it but hacking into it with force and vigor, leaving little jagged bits uncut, to catch the ink and sparkle blackly on the page; and then painting the result in bright, vibrant colors that blow through the book like a March wind. This wasn’t smooth in the least. It shook and quivered and banged and rattled. I don’t know what Mr. Rohmann calls this technique, but I love it. It reminds me of the woodcuts of William Nicholson: deep black, solid color; power and simplicity and wit all bound up in one unforgettable image.

But the roughness (if I can call it that) hasn’t compromised the accuracy of the drawing at all. In fact it enhances it. In one of the “Little Nemo” strips by the great Winsor McCay, there is a picture — just one frame — showing six Bactrian camels (the two-humped variety) harnessed to a chariot and all colliding with one another and falling over in a heap. Every single limb is in the right place, and the perspective is immaculate, and everything works. Now since the world began, no one has ever seen that happen; but McCay could draw it perfectly. In My Friend Rabbit, Mr. Rohmann has nine animals all doing something similar, and everything works, and it’s all done in a thick, bold, hefty line that you could tow an oceangoing ship with. It’s funny up close, and you can put it on a table twenty feet away, as I have just done, and it’s still funny — it still works.

The man is a genius.

I haven’t space to do more than mention his many other qualities: handsome, generous, witty, and debonair, he is like Ivan Skavinsky Skivar in the old song, who “could imitate Irving, play poker or pool, and perform on the Spanish guitar.” But enough of that. When I heard that he’d been awarded the Caldecott Medal, I gave a yell of delight that is still echoing around the ancient rafters of this house.

Well done, Mr. Rohmann! Well done, Simon Boughton, who published My Friend Rabbit! Well done, Caldecott committee! Well done all round!

Philip Pullman is the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy.