In Memoriam: Petra Mathers, author whose children’s stories soared

•  PENELOPE GREEN

GERMANY: Petra Mathers, a German-born children’s book illustrator and author whose kindly, often bumbling animal characters were nonetheless quietly heroic and often risked much for love, died at her home in Astoria, Ore. She was 78. Patty Flynn, her executor, said that Mathers and her husband, Michael Mathers, a photographer, who was 79, took their own lives. There did not appear to be an obvious health concern that precipitated their act, though they had often told friends that they could not live without each other. They were a private, devoted couple, and the timing of their deaths remains a mystery.

With spare, naive images rendered in ink, pencil and watercolour, Mathers’s stories — whose subjects included a soulful museum guard (an alligator) who falls in love with the subject in a painting (another alligator) and a warm-hearted chicken named Lottie and her best friend, Herbie, a duck — were just as sparely written, but imbued with sly humour and wit, captivating both her 8-and-under audience and their parents.

“Here is the story of a chicken who flees the coop,” Carol Brightman wrote in 1985 in a New York Times review of Mathers’s first book, “Maria Theresa,” the tale of a dreamy fowl who has all sorts of adventures. “You know the type. No ordinary laying hen, this one sometimes stops ‘in mid-peck as if listening to faraway voices.’”

Mathers’ prose and her “flat, old-fashioned cut-out Surrealism” combined “an attention to both the commonplace and the arcane which marks the best of children’s literature,” Brightman wrote. “The book’s final tableau of circus folk (and fowl) dancing the Tango Argentine outside Miss Lola’s Airstream is a triumph of this vision. What else but a hopelessly romantic chicken, one that never forgets to lay the morning egg, could bring us such a show.”

Other reviewers compared the loopily unfurling tale to a Fellini film. Mathers had already written four books when she began her Lottie series in the late 1990s. Why focus on chickens? an interviewer asked her. “I can make them move, draw them to express feelings,” she replied, adding: “Lottie is my role model. Even though it seems that I am inventing her, she already exists in all of us when we are at our best.”

Mattie is Lottie’s beloved aunt; here she is 99 years old, and dying, and Lottie travels to the hospital to say goodbye. Aunt Mattie wakes up to greet her. “They’re expecting me upstairs, but I told them I was waiting for you,” she says. “Oh Lottie, what fun we’ve had.” And off Aunt Mattie goes. It’s not clear where, but there’s an airplane waiting for her — a flight on “Out of This World Airlines” — and lots of other chickens. Everyone looks pretty happy. Back home, Lottie finds a note waiting for her.

“By the time you read this I will be dead,” it says, “and I imagine you’re feeling a little down in the beak. That’s why I’m writing this letter. I’ve had a long and happy life doing what I love best.” Aunt Mattie adds, “Now it’s time to make room for someone else on this earth.” “Petra was really very important and not as celebrated as she deserved to be,” Anne Schwartz, Mathers’s longtime editor, said by phone.