Children experience a feast of the senses that becomes vanishingly rare for the adult: firsts. And these firsts come several times. There is the first Christmas, and the first Christmas they can actually open presents, and then the first Christmas that they actually comprehend some of what is going on. After all that, there comes the first Christmas that they fully remember the procession of Christmases leading up to this one and look to this day with a feeling of weighty import and meaningful tradition. At least, this would be the case if we had traditions.
Tasha Tudor’s A Time to Keep displays the traditions of an eccentric New England farm with little blond children journeying through the year. The book is framed with a little girl asking her grandmother what life was like for her mother when she was a girl, an age-old fascination for children. The grandmother, a fictionalized version of Tudor, describes the passage of a year with all its celebrations and ceremonies.
Going through each month of the year, Tudor includes a verse of poetry to introduce the season and a handful of feasts, events, and activities that mark the special occasions of that month each year. Her watercolor paintings are highly realistic and detailed (though not as painstakingly detailed as Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge). The children are lifelike and energetic, pudgy in all the right places and posed in everyday action, no doubt inspired by real life. Tudor said that she has a treasure trove of sketches of her children in their growing-up years from which to seek inspiration. Also, like Barklem and illustrator Barbara McClintock, Tudor creates exquisite borders incorporating seasonal flowers and imagery.
The festivals for each holiday, religious and patriotic, are so over-the-top as to seem incredible. However, an investigation into the world Tudor crafted for her four children reveals that much of it really did happen in just that way. More on that later.
Despite the sense that the grandmother describing the traditions with all their preparation and fine food likely was the one responsible for all the work that went into them, there is a strong sense that the excitement of the children is foremost in the recollection. The adults appear reassuringly managing the events, but the children take center stage, whether at the marionette show, the Dolls’ Fair, or at “an enchanting creche in the woods.” The children, which seems to be a brood of four, as Tudor had in real life, with cousins and neighbors joining for various festivities. They could be any child, brimming with jubilation at the sights, sounds, and smells of special days.
A description of the book published in 1977 states, “A Time to Keep brings together all the qualities for which Tasha Tudor is famed. The delicacy of her watercolors. The nostalgic and imaginative surroundings. The intricate borders with which she prefers to surround her illustrations. Avid gardeners will recognize flowers, grasses, and herbs of New England. Friends and acquaintances will recognize her home, her corgis, her family and friends.”
Tudor, a prolific artist, though she viewed her work as merely commercial, produced more than two dozens books and contributed illustrations to more than 100. In this book, as in all her other, one cannot avoid comment on her signature Pembroke Welsh Corgis, foxlike dogs with stubby legs and no tails. These humorous and spirited dogs were life-long companions for Tudor, and she frequently incorporated them in her illustrations. She even made them the main characters in books, such as The Corgiville Fair, a resounding commercial success, which led to an eventual Corgiville trilogy ending with her last published book, Corgiville Christmas, which appeared in 2002. She was known to frequent inquire, “How could you resist a corgi?” and called her beloved breed “the epitome of beauty.” The dogs in A Time to Keep are an integral part of all the goings-on about the farm throughout the year.
While charming, the traditions featured throughout the year seem too elaborate to be real. Could anyone make such small and complex accessories, Valentines, and programs for dolls? Who would sail lighted birthday cakes down the river? What family could make such remarkable homemade Christmas gifts? Biographical information, especially documentaries exploring Tudor’s eccentricities, such as Take Joy! The Magical World of Tasha Tudor, reveal that, as incredible as they are, the traditions she depicts formed the rhythm of life for her four children when they were young. This side of Tudor’s life became more widely known and appreciated with the publication of The Private World of Tasha Tudor, Tasha Tudor’s Garden, and Tasha Tudor’s Heirloom Crafts, which occurred in the 1990s. In the years since then, she has gained ardent admirers for more than her artistic talents but simply for her way of living.
Described by the society founded to memorialize her, Tudor was “an early American lifestyle icon.” It’s not clear if Tudor was being entirely facetious when she said she thought she had been reincarnated, so enthusiastically and faithfully did she replicate and live an 1830s lifestyle on her farm in Vermont. From weaving her own cloth, to cultivating a sprawling New England garden, Tudor created a domestic world that paired old time New England living with something otherworldly. For her commitment to antiquated domestic arts and a life that was itself a work of art, she has been dubbed an “unconventional Martha Stewart.”
Tudor’s life was an odd one. Tudor scholar Jeanette Chandler Knazek has provided biographical information about Tudor for the Tasha Tudor Society and other initiatives to preserve memory of Tudor’s life and work. (Evidently, Knazek came to be fascinated with Tudor early in life, collecting the artist’s work from a very young age. According to the Ephemera Society: “Her [Knazek’s] collection of Tasha Tudor ephemera begun at the age of five is considered the most complete in every category.”)
Tudor was born in Massachusetts, the child of William Starling and Rosamond Tudor Burgess. Her parents were well-to-do New Englanders—Boston Brahmins—pedigreed, outrageous, and artistic. Originally named Starling after her father, Tudor’s name was changed to Natasha after the character in War and Peace. The name was later shortened to Tasha. During a turbulent childhood of moves and eventually the dissolution of her parent’s marriage, Tudor remained in the care of her beloved Scottish nanny, Mary D. Burnett, whom Tudor called “Dady.” Dady began to train Tudor in cooking, sewing, and the domestic arts for which she would become so admired.
Coming into adulthood, Tudor was committed to forging a career as an illustrator. At the same time, she was passionately interested in old New England farming techniques and aspired to live on a full-scale working farm in New England, which she did in 1945 when she and her young family moved to New Hampshire. The scenes in her illustrations show the experience of that farming and the unique life Tudor crafted there. Apart from a brief stint early in life in Maryland and occasional trips, Tudor spent her entire life in New England, first Massachusetts, then her mother’s home in Connecticut, then her family’s farm in New Hampshire, and eventually a small, forested property where her son built her signature Corgi Cottage in Vermont where she spent her final years.
A strange, sad footnote to Tudor’s life arose with the acrimonious legal battle that ensued amongst her children following her death in 2008 from complications from a stroke. It appears from the inside, the eccentric, other-worldly existence and break up of the family through another generation of divorce was not as idyllic as the scenes Tudor created in her artwork. Her son, Thomas Tudor, though he didn’t care for the lifestyle, confirmed that the cakes floating down the river were real. He said, “I didn’t like wearing homespun clothes or getting my hair cut by my father. But we certainly communed with nature. We’d go down to the river and float cakes down on little rafts at nighttime, with candles burning on them.”
The facts of the case, so embroiled in decades of family conflict, are impossible to discern. What is undeniable is that Tudor was a talented woman of great artistic energy who made her way memorably in the world. The description of her life at the back of A Time to Keep puts it well: “Above all, she is a painter who is able to translate her joy in a flower, her happiness in a task performed well, her pleasure in the turning seasons, her appreciation of traditional values, into a form that speaks eloquently to readers everywhere.”
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