Vera Neville
Collection of Patricia Neville-Downe
VERA NEVILLE was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 2, 1904. A year later, her family moved to Interlaken, New Jersey, where her father worked as a real estate developer. As a young girl, Vera took ballet, piano, and horseback riding lessons. She spent summers on her grandmother’s farm in Canada, where she fell in love with animals and began to craft little drawings of horses, cats, and mice.
The Neville family returned to Detroit in 1916, and Vera began to study art in earnest, taking lessons from Paul Honoré, an American artist known for colorful murals. After high school graduation, Vera moved to New York City and began her studies at the Art Students League. At the League, Vera sharpened her skills and talent, training under renowned American artists George Bridgman and Cecilia Beaux.
In 1928 Vera married fellow artist William B. Hamaker, and they settled in Greenwich Village. Vera first began working in fashion illustration and advertising art but later found steady employment as a children’s book and magazine illustrator. Her first children’s book, The Meddlesome Mouse, which she both wrote and illustrated, was published in 1931.
Over the next thirteen years, Vera illustrated many children’s books, including the comical Lazy Liza Lizard by Marie Curtis Rains; The Lonely Little Pig, a collection of animal tales; and Highway Past Her Door by Mary Wolfe Thompson, a young adult romance. Vera wrote and illustrated two books of her own, Little Bo and Safety for Sandy. She also drew the pictures for stories in children’s magazines, such as Child Life and Story Parade, as well as Christmas cards for the American Artists Group. Her illustrations of animals and children were delightful and lifelike, full of motion and detail.
In 1944, the Thomas Y. Crowell Company, publisher of the Betsy-Tacy books, needed a new illustrator for the high school series featuring Betsy and Tacy, which Maud Hart Lovelace had begun to write. Lois Lenski, the artist of the first four Betsy-Tacy books, declined to illustrate the new longer books as she preferred to work on stories for younger readers. Lenski mentioned Vera Neville as a possible artist for the forthcoming series. Vera was hired in 1945 to illustrate Heaven to Betsy, the first Betsy-Tacy high school story.
Vera’s illustrations of teenage Betsy and her friends were authentic to the 1900s era. She studied photographs of Maud Hart Lovelace and her friends to create the lovable pictures of Betsy, Tacy, Tib, Carney, Joe, Cab, and all of the other characters in the books. Vera researched fashion, furnishings, and household items to make her illustrations as realistic as possible. Readers fell in love with Vera’s charming and sometimes comical, sometimes heartbreaking depictions of Betsy Ray. The high school stories proved to be as popular as the younger Betsy-Tacy books, and Maud wrote a new one each year.
Vera Neville and Maud Hart Lovelace continued their partnership for ten years, which included the four Betsy-Tacy high school books, the Deep Valley books (Carney’s House Party, Emily of Deep Valley, and Winona’s Pony Cart), and the stories of Betsy’s adult years, Betsy and the Great World and Betsy’s Wedding. At the same time, Vera drew the pictures for several more children’s books, including A Lion for Patsy by Miriam Mason and Two Hundred Pennies by Catherine Woolley.
Vera illustrated one more children’s book, Pigtail Pioneer, in 1956 and then retired from the publishing world. She settled in Michigan and worked in her father’s real estate business. She passed away in March 1979.
Vera Neville’s remarkable artwork lives on in the Betsy-Tacy books as new generations of readers become acquainted with Betsy and her friends.