Together with her husband, Joe Hearne, who is a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Jan visits many different countries where she researches the architecture and costumes that appear in her work. 'I'm delighted and surprised when fragments of these beautiful images come back to me in my painting.' 'It was overwhelming to see the room-size landscapes and towering stone sculptures, and then moments later to refocus on delicately embroidered kimonos and ancient porcelain,' she says. The detail in my work helps to convince me, and I hope others as well, that such places might be real.'Īs a student at the Boston Museum School, she spent hours in the Museum of Fine Arts. Now I try to recreate that feeling of believing that the imaginary place I'm drawing really exists. She says, 'I remember the special quiet of rainy days when I felt that I could enter the pages of my beautiful picture books.

During the summer her family moves to a home in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts.Īs a child, Jan Brett decided to be an illustrator and spent many hours reading and drawing. Jan lives in a seacoast town in Massachusetts, close to where she grew up. With over thirty four million books in print, Jan Brett is one of the nation's foremost author illustrators of children's books.

This book is also available in Spanish, as El mitón. Jan Brett is also the creator of such wintery classics as The Hat, The Snowy Nap, Three Snowy Bears, The Animals Santa, and The Night Before Christmas. In her distinctive style, Jan Brett brings the animals to life with warmth and humor, and her illustrations are full of visual delights and details faithful to the Ukrainian tradition from which the story comes. Finally, a big brown bear is followed in by a tiny brown mouse and what happens next makes for a wonderfully funny climax.Īs the story of the animals in the mitten unfolds, the reader can see Nicki in the borders of each page, walking through the woods unaware of what is going on. One by one, woodland animals find it and crawl in first, a curious mole, then a rabbit, a badger and others, each one larger than the last. When Nicki drops his white mitten in the snow, he goes on without realizing that it is missing. Jan Bretts beautiful retelling makes a perfect holiday gift. In this bestselling modern classic, a young boys lost mitten leads to a charming snowy adventure.

The mitten story animals in order