Christine Price

(1928-1980)

Christine Price was the author and illustrator of many outstanding books on art and art appreciation for young readers, taking art in its widest sense to include folk crafts and dance as well as the products of artists in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and other historical periods. The simple, uncomplicated prose style which char­acterized all her writing concealed the fact that each book involved a great deal of original research and travel.

Born in England in 1928, she came to the United States with her family in 1940. Her father Clair Price, was a European corre­spondent for The New York Times in the 1920s and 1930s.

After attending Vassar College for a year in the mid-1940s, Christine decided to make art her lifework, and began studying at the Art Students League, building up a portfolio with which she made the rounds of publishers in New York. In summer 1947, when she was barely nineteen years old, she first saw her name in print as the il­lustrator of two books for young people published by E. P. Dutton, She drew the pictures for many other books, bur always with the aim of writing as well as illustrating, and in 1951 her first children's book, Three Golden Nobles, appeared, set in fourteenth-century England.

The first of her series of art books, Made in the Middle Ages, was published in 1961, to be followed in 1963 by Made in the Renaissance. Her extensive travels began with the re­search tor The Story of Moslem Art (1964) and continued in connec­tion with Made in Ancient Egypt (1970), Made in West Africa (1975), and her last book in this series, Made in the South Pacific (1979).

Travel and writing ro her became inseparable, since she be­lieved in immersing herself in her subject so as to experience it to the fullest extent. Journeys to Africa in the early and middle 1970s re­sulted not only in Made in West Africa but also in Talking Drums of Africa (1973) and its eompaniun volume, Dinning Masks of Africa (1975), both illustrated with her own vigorous linocuts. And after visiting her sister and brother-in-law in Ethiopia in 1968, she edited and illustrated a collection of Ethiopian folktales, The Rich Man and the Singer (1971).

She and her parents had moved to Castleton in the early 1950s from Chappaqua, New York, and Frisbie Hill was home to Christine until 1978, when she moved to New Mexico, drawn by her growing interest in the West and in the three strands, American, Spanish and Indian, that make up the culture of New Mexico.

(http://www.castleton.edu/Price/christ...)

Her last book was Dance on the Dusty Earth (1979), which describes the role of dance in the lives of primitive peoples the world over. But by then she was suffering from cancer, and on January 13, 1980 she died, sustained to the last by her strong Christian faith.

On her many travels Christine gathered hundreds of ex­amples of everyday things such as pots, bowls, spoons, combs, and canoe paddles, which now form Castleton State College’s Christine Price Collection.

These words, from the last chapter of Heirs of the Ancient Maya (1972), which she wrote to accompany Gertrude Duby Blom's outstanding photographs of Lacandon Indiains of Chiapas, Mexico, are an expression ot Christine’s philosophy: "We have seen the Lacandons as links with the past, but they are far more than ghosts or shadows of their glorious ancestors. They are people who have learned to live in tune with their world, fighting only against those who have tried to rob them of their freedom. They have suf­fered hardship and tragedy, but they still know how to laugh. Their life has the beauty of simple things that can outlast the rise and fall of cities, and there is wisdom in the way of the people."