One of Saturn Press’s most popular birthday cards is Cat Smile, with its joyful cat standing on its hind legs, ready to dance. The work of artist Diane Thorne inspired the card.
Diane Thorne’s name at birth was Ann Woursell, born in Odessa, Russia in 1895. She was the eldest child in a large Jewish family. Eventually, because of the persecution of the Jews in Russia, her family was forced to emigrate to Canada. From Canada, her family relocated to Germany, and then, with the onset of World War I, she moved for the final time, arriving in New York City in 1917. Throughout these dramatic upheavals and dislocations in her life, Diane Thorne continued to draw and make sketches of animal life, of which she was a keen observer. She found work as a commercial artist in New York City in 1929 which led her to become a writer and illustrator of over forty children’s books. Her specialty was dogs and cats, and she was celebrated for demonstrating the motion of dogs and the personalities of cats. Thorne even illustrated one of the most famous dogs in America in the 1940s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s beloved Scottie.
Sadly, Thorne died in 1963 alone and without a will at the New York City Hospital on Welfare Island. Despite her life of hardship and the anti-Semitism she faced, art lovers remember her today as an illustrator of great renown. Fortunately, her work is included in collections from institutions such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Finding her children’s books from the 1940s on eBay and Etsy has also been fun! See the below for a feel of her wonderful work from her collaboration with Connie Moran on The Antique Cat.
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See Cat Smile card.
