These books were mostly published by either Doubleday, Dragonfly Books or Random House. Peter Spier continued to illustrate other people's stories well into the 1980s, but he made even more picture books on his own. In the following year, he illustrated a new edition of Mary Mapes Dodge's 'Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates', another classic novel set in the Netherlands. The illustrations presented a romanticized view of the Dutch landscapes and the city of Alkmaar. It brought Spier back to his Dutch roots, as it tells the story of a bored cow, who leaves her farm and moves on to explore the city. One of the first books illustrated by Spier was 'The Cow Who Fell in the Canal' (1957) by Phyllis Krasilovsky. They both had successful careers as commercial illustrators, but Peter eventually drifted towards writing and illustrating children's books. There, Peter truly followed in his father's footsteps.
He spent four years in the Royal Navy and was a reporter for Elseviers Weekblad.īy 1952 the Spier family had moved to the United States, where they eventually settled on Long Island, New York. Back in the Netherlands, Peter Spier got his artistic education at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. In 1942 the Spier family was first held in Villa Bouchina, the parsonage of the Doetinchem Christian Reformed Church, and then sent to Theresienstadt in occupied Czecho-Slovakia. But since the leader of the Dutch Nazi party NSB, Anton Mussert, was a fan of Jo Spier's work, they got a privileged treatment. The Jewish Spier family was imprisoned during the final years of World War II. Peter spent most of his childhood in Broek in Waterland. His father was Jo Spier, at the time one of the Netherlands' most prominent newspaper and advertising illustrators. Peter Spier was born in 1927 in Amsterdam.
Several of his works, like 'Noah's Ark' (1977), have little or no text and sequential narratives, balancing on the thin line between pantomime comics and traditional picture books. Peter Spier was a Dutch-American illustrator and author of children's books.
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