Susan Einzig (née Suzanne Einzig, 1922 Berlin, Germany – 2009 London, England)
Illustration to Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce (1958)
Watercolour
Private Collection
© The Estate of Susan Einzig
Immigrated to England 1939
Perhaps Einzig's best-known work is her series of evocative black-and-white illustrations to the children’s book, Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, published in 1958, which earned her the National Book League’s Illustration Prize. This celebrated story, a narrative of love and loss, slips between fantasy and reality as the protagonist, Tom, attempts to lay to rest the ghosts of the past. Einzig is known to have visited Pearce and made careful notes in her preparation for this work but it is hard not to recall the lost Eden of her own Dahlem childhood – a three-storey house, surrounded by a large tree-filled garden, where the gardener still cut the grass with a scythe and where she must have played with her brother, Rolf (with whom she later lost touch) – haunting these images. Martin Salisbury, Professor of Illustration at Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, has also observed that, 'The wraparound full colour dust jacket with hand-rendered titles in the Neo-Romantic manner can be seen as one of the most iconic book cover designs'.
