Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman

Ruth Rosekrans Hoffman (7 January 1926 - 26 September 2007) was an American children's book illustrator and painter, known as Rosekrans Hoffman professionally.

Early life

Ruth Olive Rosekrans was born at her parents’ home on 7 January 1926 in Denton, Nebraska. She was the second child of James Charles, a contractor, and Pearl D Rosekrans, née Hocking.

She began drawing at the age of three or four. When she was seven she contracted osteomyelitis, a bone infection only treatable at that time by painful bone drains. She had to stay in a full body cast, with only her arms and hands free, for 18 months. It was during this period that she began to develop her artistic abilities. She began by copying newspaper comic strips from the Lincoln Star newspaper including ''Tillie the Toiler'', ''Dick Tracy'', '' Mutt and Jeff'' and '' Popeye''.

She said the experience “gave me a new perspective on life… in bed in the body cast, horizontal, I saw things I wouldn’t ordinarily see. I wasn’t a child looking up, but more like a part of the land. From my prone position, I used to eye my food like an explorer surveying the horizon. Piles of mashed potatoes took on the proportions of mountains against the skyline. Undersides of chins, nostrils, palms jumped out at me. I studied expressions, the details of wallpaper, and tiny hairs peeking out of people’s ears.”

She would spend many more months in partial casts, a wheelchair, and homemade braces that her father invented to enable her to become more mobile. She used a walking stick for the rest of her life.

Education

She recovered sufficiently to attend Denton School District 136, graduating from Denton High School in 1945. She studied art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she was “strongly influenced” by her teacher, the muralist and painter Kady Faulkner. She was a member of Delta Phi Delta, a national art honorary society. She gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1948, after which she took graduate work at Penn State.

Personal life

In 1949 she married Mervyn L Cadwallader in Lancaster, Nebraska. They moved to California so that he could complete his PhD in history at the University of California, Berkeley. She spent her time painting, and studying with Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker Yasuo Kuniyoshi. In 1952 they were living on Hall Street, Brooklyn, New York.

By 1955 she and Cadwallader had divorced and she married Robert Hoffman in New York City. They bonded over a shared love of jazz. During this period she wrote “a lot of letters” to the City Council encouraging them to make buildings more accessible. About this endeavor she said, “So many buildings were built without access by ramp or rail for the handicapped. I think it was the feeling of those times that the handicapped should be put away out of sight.” In an interview from 1978 she "takes credit" for initiating a change in the city's views on accessibility.

In the early 1970s they built a home in West Haven, Connecticut which they shared with a pet cat, Boy, who appeared in many of her illustrations.

After Robert's retirement in 1991 they moved to Lincoln, Nebraska where she became active in local community life. She was a member of Denton Community Historical Society (DCHS), and a supporter of the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association, the Junior League of Lincoln, Lincoln City Public Library's Heritage Room and the University Place Art Center (now Lux Center for the Arts).

When Robert died in 1999, she moved to a nursing home in David City, Nebraska.

Early work

She held several art-related jobs before becoming a full-time illustrator of children's books. She worked as an artist for Balco Research Inc. in Newark, New Jersey

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