Jan Brett Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1949 -

Jan Brett (born December 1, 1949) is an American illustrator and writer of children's picture books. She is known for colorful, detailed depictions of a wide variety of animals and human cultures ranging from Scandinavia to Africa. Her best-known titles include The Mitten, The Hat, and Gingerbread Baby. She has adapted or retold numerous traditional stories such as the Gingerbread Man and Goldilocks and has illustrated some classics such as "The Owl and the Pussycat".

Brett was born and still lives in Massachusetts. She decided to be an illustrator as a child and recalls, "I felt that I could enter the pages of my beautiful picture books. Now I try to recreate that feeling of believing that the imaginary place I'm drawing really exists." She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and now travels extensively to research architecture and costume for her books.

Brett's earliest book in the Library of Congress online catalog was published by Atheneum Books in 1978 under her married name: Woodland Crossings, with 43 pages of text by Stephen Krensky and drawings by Jan Brett Bowler. The Library phoned her that September and learned that she would be using her maiden name thereafter. Its catalog covers 13 books she created from 1978 to 1984, all but one as an illustrator with another writer. That one was the self-illustrated picture book Fritz and the Beautiful Horses, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1981. Beginning with Annie and the Wild Animals (Houghton Mifflin, 1985) she created numerous picture books as writer and illustrator. For a few years she continued to work with other writers, especially Eve Bunting, but she has rarely done so since 1990.

On August 18, 1980 Jan Brett married bassist Joseph Hearne, a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1962.

Brett maintains a list of books online that may be complete for her original writings and adaptations. For almost every listing she identifies a specific setting such as Salzburg, Austria, for her first book as a writer, Fritz and the Beautiful Horses (1978), and Novgorod, Russia, for her recent adaptation Cinders: A Chicken Cinderella (2013).