As a girl in 1940s Chicago, Jeanette Winter found pleasure but also confusion in telling stories through drawing.
This, she knew, was her passion — but how could it ever be her life?
Jeanette never read about the lives of artists. What artists she knew about were not women. And people who did what she loved professionally — illustrators of children’s books — seemed as remote as fictional characters, with backgrounds and even names that suggested otherworldly glamour.
After decades of study and work, however, Ms. Winter joined their ranks. She found an unusual specialty in turning the lives of great artists — often figures renowned for aesthetic sophistication, like Emily Dickinson and J.S. Bach — into inviting, inspiring picture books for children.
“I always wanted to be an artist, but I had no role models,” she said in an interview with the blog and shopping site A Mighty Girl.
In another interview, with a fellow children’s author, Patricia Newman, Ms. Winter spoke autobiographically about one of her illustrated biographies, “My Name Is Georgia” (1998), about Georgia O’Keeffe.
“It is a book,” she said, “I would have liked to have as a child.”
Ms. Winter died on Nov. 7 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 86. The cause was heart and kidney failure, her son, Jonah Winter, said.
Ms. Winter was the writer, illustrator or both of more than 65 children’s books, so many that she lost count. After her death, Publisher’s Weekly wrote, “She is widely credited with helping to establish what is now a robust picture book nonfiction category.”
A 2003 review in The New York Times praised Ms. Winter’s biographies for giving “children the opportunity to grasp art and poetry otherwise cordoned off for adults.”
Another Times review from around the same time observed that Ms. Winter’s books have the special quality of showing children how the work of major artists often originates in their experiences of childhood. Implicitly, the reviewer added, Ms. Winter’s work argued that artists are as important as the politicians and inventors who get more attention in classrooms.
While the majority of Ms. Winter’s books were nonfiction, many were not biographies. “Mama” (2006) told the true story of a baby hippopotamus separated from its mother in a tsunami, taken to a wildlife refuge and adopted by a 130-year-old tortoise. The book achieves its emotional effects through utter simplicity, using only the words “mama” and “baby.”
Ms. Winter’s career had two main breakthroughs. The first came in “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” her 1988 book about the Underground Railroad. Instead of drafting her work in drawings, Ms. Winter immediately began to paint.
“I gave up line,” Ms. Winter told Publisher’s Weekly 10 years later. “That’s when color took over.”
From then on, she became known for illustrating in a crude, childlike style achieved with artistic deliberateness. Her work was sometimes described as evoking folk art, sometimes as resembling paintings by Henri Rousseau or Marc Chagall.
The other breakthrough was associated with “Diego” (1991). It was Ms. Winter’s first picture-book biography, and she asked her son, Jonah, to write the text. They collaborated on several more children’s book biographies, like “Once Upon a Time in Chicago” (2000), about the clarinetist Benny Goodman, as well as on books with other themes, like “The Secret Project” (2017) about the building of the atomic bomb.
Ms. Winter often got her ideas from the newspaper. One Sunday in 2003, she read a Times article about Alia Muhammad Baker, a 50-year-old librarian in Basra, Iraq, who spirited away 30,000 books from the city’s main library — 70 percent of its collection — nine days before a fire destroyed everything that remained.
“I knew immediately that I needed to make a book out of this story,” Ms. Winter told the website BookPage.
Her book, “The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq,” earned wide coverage and stimulated debate about the depiction of war in children’s books. Ms. Winter did not shy away from images of destruction, but she wanted the focus to be on her protagonist.
“Alia was in such impossible circumstances, and she defied her surroundings and acted with such courage,” Ms. Winter told Voice of America.
Harcourt, the book’s publisher, donated some of its proceeds to rebuilding the Basra library.
Jeanette Margot Ragner was born on Oct. 6, 1939, in Chicago. Her parents, both Swedish immigrants, were John, a house painter who formed his own painting and decorating company, and Signe (Persson) Ragner, who worked as a hairdresser in her youth.
Ms. Winter got a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in 1960. The same year, she married Roger Winter, who was also an artist. They moved to New York City, and both worked at libraries before relocating to Texas, where they raised their two sons, Jonah and Max.
Ms. Winter’s husband and their sons survive her. In the last 30 years, she and her husband lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her collaboration with Jonah ultimately led him to establish a successful career of his own writing children’s books.
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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