Children’s author-illustrator Michael Hague, who created more than 100 books for young readers and was widely lauded for his vivid reimaginings of classic stories, died March 10. He was 77.
Michael Hague was born September 8, 1948, in Los Angeles to parents Riley H. Hague, and Daisy Marie Hague, who had immigrated to California from the U.K. following World War II. From a young age, Hague loved drawing, and he was encouraged in this pursuit by his British mother, who had studied art and provided him with favorite books to pore over and copy from. Hague had often cited Walt Disney’s characters and Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant comic strip as early influences. He additionally took inspiration from baseball, drawing portraits of his favorite players. “I don’t remember wanting to be anything but an artist or a baseball player,” he told the Los Angeles Times in a 1990 profile. “I was just better at drawing than I was at baseball.”
With plans to illustrate books, Hague studied at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he was introduced to classic illustrators such as Arthur Rackham, W. Heath Robinson, and N.C. Wyeth, among others, a discovery that led him to focus on painting. He earned a BFA with honors in 1972. During his time at Art Center College of Design, Hague met fellow student Kathleen Burdick. The couple married in 1970 and later collaborated on numerous book projects. They welcomed three children together.
After graduating from the Art Center, Hague tried to find children’s book illustration work but was “getting nowhere,” he said in a 2013 q&a at Chemers Gallery in Tustin, Calif., so he took a job at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Mo. He spent “a valuable two years” at Hallmark, which included publishing the pop-up book Gulliver in Lilliput in 1975, and then moved to Colorado Springs, Colo. to work at Current, Inc., designing greeting cards and calendars.
But Hague held onto his dream of illustrating children’s books and continued to send a portfolio of his work out to publishers. Despite receiving rejection letters that said things like “your stuff’s too weird for kids; try science fiction,” he kept on. In 1976, Hague got what he called his big break when the late Trina Schart Hyman and Dilys Evans, then art directors at children’s magazine Cricket, hired him to illustrate the fairy tale “The Porcelain Cat.” He subsequently painted several covers for the publication, which led to a children’s book editor offering Hague his first full-color illustration project, the story collection Dream Weaver by Jane Yolen (Collins, 1979). From that point on, Hague received steady work in the illustration field.
In 1980, Hague saw the publication of what he considered his first wildly successful book, his interpretation of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (Holt). He went on to illustrate a variety of other classic works and fairy tales, including The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (Holt, 1982), The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Holt, 1987), as well as Michael Hague’s Treasured Classics (Chronicle, 2011). Among the collaborations with his wife were East of the Sun and West of the Moon (Harcourt, 1980); Numbears: A Counting Book (Holt, 1986), and Good Night, Fairies (SeaStar, 2002).
By 2003, Hague began experimenting with Photoshop. He further expanded his artistic exploration by teaming up with his son Devon, a graphic designer, to write and illustrate the graphic novel In the Small (Little, Brown, 2008), a tale inspired by a favorite family game. He also found a spark in yet another format. Hague told his Chemers Gallery audience that working on his Eye of Newt series of comic books for Dark Horse Comics in the early 2010s was “the most fun I’ve ever had doing a book.”
Marc Cheshire, former president and publisher of NorthSouth Books and former editorial director of children’s books at Holt, was Hague’s longtime editor. He shared this remembrance: “Michael was a great illustrator and a warm, generous man. We shared a passion for illustrated classics by Rackham, Wyeth, and Dulac, and we worked together on dozens of books and calendars. At book signings he would often do little drawings in each book, and I loved to watch the faces of the kids and adults as he effortlessly brought characters like Mr. Toad, the Velveteen Rabbit, and the Cowardly Lion to life.”
