Esphyr Slobodkina (ess-FEER sloh-BOD-kee-nah) was born in Chelyabinsk, Siberia. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, she emigrated with her family to Harbin, Manchuria (China), where she studied art and architecture. Slobodkina immigrated to the United States in 1929. She enrolled at the National Academy of Design. It was there that she met her future husband, Russian-born Ilya Bolotowsky (they were divorced in 1938). Along with Ilya, Slobodkina was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, which began amid controversy in 1936. Like other Russian modernists, surrounded by ancient icons and a rich craft tradition, Slobodkina developed a lifelong appreciation of clear, rich colors, and flat, stylized forms.
In 1937 Slobodkina met the children's author Margaret Wise Brown. In an effort to find work as an illustrator, Slobodkina wrote and illustrated a story with collage called Mary And The Poodies to present to Brown. This began a new career for Slobodkina, who illustrated many children's stories for Ms. Brown (including Sleepy ABCs and the Big and Little series) while still continuing her work as an abstract artist.
In the late 1930s, Slobodkina began to write and illustrate her own children's books. Among her 24 published works
Caps for Sale (1940) is considered a children’s book classic; it has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Other children’s works include
The Wonderful Feast (written in 1928, first published in 1955),
The Clock (1956),
The Long Island Ducklings (1961), and
Pezzo the Peddler and the Circus Elephant (1967), reissued as
Circus Caps for Sale (2002).
In 1948, feeling the need to get out of New York City and having saved some money, Slobodkina built a house in Great Neck, New York and moved there with her mother; they remained in the house until 1977.
During this period she was invited back to the Yaddo artist’s colony and also accepted a residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. In 1960, Slobodkina married William Urquhart, a business owner whom she had met in 1942 at an American Abstract Artists show. They were married for three years, but in 1963, Urquhart died after suffering from a prolonged illness. Slobodkina stated that “it took me some six years to just recover from the grief and life in general was never the same”... In 1967, Slobodkina and her mother began travelling to Florida to be close to her sister. Annual trips to the southern state soon became impractical because of her mother’s failing health and in 1979, they permanently relocated to Hallandale, Florida. After the death of Slobodkina's brother-in-law in 1974 and her mother in 1975, her sister Tamara joined her in her Hallandale home. The two sisters continued to live together for the rest of Slobodkina's life, moving from Hallandale to West Hartford, CT, then back to Great Neck before settling in Glen Head, Long Island.
Slobodkina died in 2002.