TitleFiddle Ferns
Artist
Ruth Chrisman Gannett
(American, 1896 - 1979)
Date1948
MediumLithograph on cream wove paper
DimensionsSheet size: 11 15/16 × 8 5/8 in.
Image size: 7 5/16 × 4 15/16 in.
SignedSigned in graphite at LR: "Ruth Gannett 1948".
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, December 7, 1970
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1982.2214
Label TextRuth Gannet was born in Santa Ana, CA. She studied at the University of California at Berkley, the Art Students' League in New York and in the studio of Winold Reis. She also studied theater design with Norman Bell-Geddes. She was a lithographer and award-winning illustrator of children's books, such as the still popular "My Father's Dragon" (1948) by her stepdaughter Ruth Stiles Gannett, and her husband the writer, Lewis Stiles Gannet. She received a Herald Tribune illustration award in 1948 for "My Father's Dragon," and a Newbery Medal for "Miss Hickory," written by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, in 1947. The Newbery Medal was named for eighteenth-century British bookseller John Newbery. It is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. She also received a Caldecott honor for "My Mother is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World," ill. by Becky Reyher in 1946. She illustrated John Steinbeck's "Tortilla Flat" (1935). In "Fiddle Ferns," her "delicate drawing technique using the lithographic crayon and probably her careful preparation of the surface of the lithographic stone produced the look of softness and fuzzy texture necessary to convey the shape and surface of the ferns."
This work may have been inspired by the work of German photographer and teacher Karl Blossfeldt, who published "Art Forms in Nature" (Urfromen der Kunst) in 1929, and "Magic in Nature" in 1932 (Wunder in der Natur) both of which prominently featured ferns, magnified to show all of their features. These books were extremely popular.
Ferns are non-flowering plants that reproduce by means of spores on the underside of fertile leaves-hence they are referred to as "vascular cryptogams" (from the Greek kryptos and gamia meaning "hidden marriage"). The hairs serve as defense from predators. The "fiddle head" shape of the fern, (so-called because of its resemblance to the scroll of stringed instruments) is the result of the frond growing faster than the tip. Fiddle ferns are a delicacy and are eaten raw and cooked.
