Category Archives: Children as artists

Build a Sandcastle to Send Off Summer

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Sandcastle. Somerville, MA : Candlewick Press, 2020. (Cotsen)

Many schools open before Labor Day now.  As is often the case, the change may be eminently practical, but downgrades the importance of an old marker of the passing year, the last long holiday weekend until Thanksgiving.  The final weekend of freedom was bittersweet, with gloomy thoughts of the looming imprisonment brightened only by the prospect of having new clothes and tight new shoes to wear the first day of class (if one were a girl, anyway).

Two delightful picture books pay tribute to sand as a building material for summertime imaginative play—Israeli author/illustrator Einat Tsarfati’s Sandcastle (2018; American translation published by Candlewick Press, c.2020, Sommerville, MA) and Peter Bentley’s Captain Jack and the Pirates illustrated by Helen Oxenbury (New York: Dial, 2016).   In Tsarfati, a girl is the architect of a fantastic palace; in Bentley a trio of boys build a ship out of whatever they have at hand.

A redhead with a red shovel, green pail, and sun hat walks by the multitudes on towels baking at the beach, ignoring the picnickers, gamers, readers, mermaids, babies, witches, and snorkelers.  She gives the shoreline a quick look, then kneels and gets to work.  Her creation is at least four stories high and its roof line with multiple turrets, spires, and domes is a sandy Chambord with spectacular ocean views.

Any king or queen worth a crown to flock to see the castle, with the royal children and corgies in tow. (A few people on the beach sneak in too.) The visitors dance the night away, refreshed by unlimited dollops of ice cream, but they are not enchanted by sand in their beds or breakfast pastries in the morning.  Who can play cards on a table made of sand or compete in the Triathlon of Knights with sand in the seat of their armor?  Well, what did they expect staying in a sandcastle?  Luckily the unnamed heroine devises a solution.  Everyone makes good firm sand balls and hurls them at the walls.  When the sea rushes in through the holes, everyone has a grand time splashing in the water. Once the sandcastle has been washed away, she starts all over.

Sandcastle.

Sandcastle.

Sandcastle.

No castle for Jack, Zack, and Caspar.  Born naval architects, they build an enormous galleon of sand and outfit it with mast (two sticks), a sail (shirt and bib), and cannons (three plastic buckets).   Mainsail hoisted, the pirate Captain Jack and his crew sail off to find loot and adventure.

In the misty distance a pirate ship looms and they set their course dead ahead, prepared to board and cover themselves with glory and pocket gold doubloons.   The gnarly rival pirates are ready to give as good as they get when a tropical squall blows the intrepid three far off course.

Their ship is swamped and it melts into the surf.  Undaunted Jack, Zack, and Caspar sneak up on their enemy’s hideout and discover sugary booty on the wooden table inside.  Ambushed by the crew members left behind to guard it (Mum and Dad), the buccaneers must submit to being rubbed with towels and changed into dry clothes.  Luckily their captors know that the quickest way to the hearts of marooned pirates is an ice cream cone.

Oxenbury fills out Bentley’s reassuringly familiar story line with clever details that creative little boys playing together could dream up themselves: it is magical without straying beyond the boundaries of the real world.

It is delightful how sand and ice cream go together like cookies and milk in these two  picture books set in such different imaginative spaces.  The story lines may be considered by some to be too gendered, but the virtuoso use of nice wet sand will surely appeal to any child who loves being by the water on a bright sunny day.

Sandcastle.

Made by a Child: A Sampler of Siblings’ Names Stitched in 1778.

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[Needlework sampler]. England, 1788. (Cotsen)

An exhibition catalogue of eighteenth-century embroidery would probably pass by this small sampler just purchased for Cotsen which records information about a family in the English Midlands 1767-1787. It is simply a list of names enclosed in a narrow  border unaccompanied by alphabets, mottoes, architecture, birds, and swirling vines in more bravura examples designed by school mistresses for their pupils.

Joan Oughton, the dexterous young needlewoman, signed at the bottom so posterity would know that she lived in Birmingham and finished the piece in 1788.   She used just three stitches–outline, cross, and tent—and a quiet,  harmonious palette of blue-gray, black, gold, and silver silk thread on linen.  The tiny stitches are so regular that the embroidered words and numbers are beautifully legible.  It  lacks the name of a teacher or school, which may be an indication that she worked it as part of lessons  at home to learn plain and ornamental needlework, an key component of girls’ education.

Perhaps Joan sewed it as  a  memorial to her sisters and brothers, rather like to writing out family members’ names, dates of birth and of passing on a blank leaf in the family Bible. Her mother was almost continually pregnant between 1766 and 1786, bearing eleven children, seven of whom survived infancy.   Joan’s brothers were Thomas Smith, who lived only a week in June 1767, James Harwick born in 1779, Samuel in 1781, and Timothy in 1783.  The oldest girl Elizabeth was born in 1768, Maria, in 1770 and passing away at age eight,  Harriet in 1772, Joan in 1773, Catherine in 1774, Ann who was alive the summer of 1778.  The last girl was a second Maria born in 1786 and living eleven months later. The detail below shows the lines for the first Maria, Harriet, Joan, Catherine, and Ann.Using Joan’s record of her brothers and sisters, I tracked down some very promising candidates for their parents in Ancestry Library even though there was no family tree that brought all these Oughtons together.  Christopher Oughton was the brood’s father.  Son of Timothy Oughton, he was born April 14th, 1747, and baptized in Lichfield, Staffordshire.  His wife was a Maria, but her maiden name and the date of their union didn’t seem to be documented.

How Christopher support his growing family?  He can be found in Birmingham city directories of tradesmen between 1751 and 1775 as a peruke maker (a more elegant term for someone who makes wigs) at fashionable 22 Church Street.  Someone in this line of work might also cut and dress hair, sell perfume and pomades, etc.  Christopher added a second, more unusual line of work around 1785—that of pawnbroking.

Joan’s somber tribute to her brothers has proven to be a little piece of family history worked on linen and a very welcome–and unusual–addition to Cotsen’s small group of samplers among the textiles.