Make way for Sal.

And for more than 60 of her father’s beloved children’s book illustrations.

A free exhibit, “Robert McCloskey: The Art of Wonder,” opens Tuesday at the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, featuring original drawings and paintings that the Maine author and artist created for several of his popular children’s books, including “Make Way for Ducklings.” The exhibit also features work from his books set in Maine: “Blueberries for Sal,” “One Morning in Maine,” “Time of Wonder” and “Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man.”

Sally McCloskey – yes, the Sal from the book – will visit the library on July 22 and Aug. 12 to read “Blueberries for Sal” and some of her father’s other works. The library will host programs related to the exhibit throughout the summer, including a panel discussion about Robert McCloskey’s influence on other artists, which includes his other daughter, author Jane McCloskey.

Sally McCloskey says she enjoys reading aloud to children, and she knows what sort of questions to expect when they find out she’s the real-life Sal. She lives most of the year on Scott Island off Little Deer Isle, the island featured in “One Morning in Maine” and “Time of Wonder” and where she grew up. The rest of the year, she lives in Ellsworth.

“Children want to know if I really met a bear,” Sally McCloskey, 78, wrote in an email to the Press Herald. “Adults want to know what it was like to grow up on an island; what it is like to be an artist’s daughter; what it is like to be famous.”

Original art from “Burt Dow. Deep-Water Man” by Robert McCloskey will be on exhibit. On loan from the May Massee Collection, Emporia State University Special Archives and Collections, Emporia, Kansas. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

McCloskey, who died in Deer Isle in 2003 at the age of 88, was a longtime Maine resident, purchasing Scott Island in 1946 and spending spring, summer and fall there for many years. He set some of his best-loved stories in Maine and based characters on people he knew and met daily. His family donated part of its property, the 6-acre Outer Scott Island, to the Nature Conservancy in 2017.

The exhibit at Curtis Memorial Library is a collaboration with the Portland-based Illustration Institute and features works on loan from the May Massee Collection at Emporia State University in Kansas. Massee was McCloskey’s longtime editor. It’s a rare chance to see original art made during the development of McCloskey’s books, some with hand-written notations or measurements in the margins. Some are pen and ink, some are watercolor. Some are early versions of scenes, and some are very close to what appears in the published books.

The show includes about 16 sketches for the 1941 book “Make Way for Ducklings” on vellum – thin tracing paper – that is more than 80 years old. The paper is so old and fragile that this is the last time Emporia State University will loan them out, exhibit organizers said. The classic children’s book is about a duck couple trying to find a place to raise their ducklings in downtown Boston.

Sketches made for “Make Way for Ducklings” by Robert McCloskey will hang in a new exhibit at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick. On loan from the May Massee Collection, Emporia State University Special Archives and Collections, Emporia, Kansas. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

Liz Doucett, executive director of Curtis Memorial Library, said it’s important to make a show like this accessible and free to all, since McCloskey’s work is beloved by so many people across several generations. The show’s sponsors include the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation and Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shops. The exhibit runs through Oct. 15.

“When you think of how many generations have read and loved his book, that makes them very powerful,” Doucett said. “His work has this very strong connection. It’s about the things that make Maine special.”

“Blueberries for Sal,” published in 1948, is about a little girl named Sal who’s picking blueberries with her mother on a Maine hill when she encounters a bear cub also picking blueberries with its mother. “One Morning in Maine” (1952) is about McCloskey and his family and their lives in Maine.

“Time of Wonder” (1958) focuses on a family’s summer on a Maine island in Penobscot Bay, while “Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man” (1963) is the colorful story of a Maine fisherman and his whale of an encounter during a raging storm.

Sally McCloskey – the Sal from Robert McCloskey’s “Blueberries for Sal” – will read from her father’s works this summer at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick. Photo courtesy of Sally McCloskey

McCloskey’s work will be exhibited throughout the library, said Scott Nash, co-founder and executive director of the Illustration Institute. He said the library is the perfect place to show McCloskey’s work because library staff understand the importance of illustration in storytelling.

“It’s sometimes difficult to place illustrations in a museum. They’re seen as being on the fringes,” Nash said. “It just feels right to be able to display these works in the same place as the books themselves.”

Doucett said the library decided to try to host a McCloskey exhibit after seeing how popular the library’s 2018 exhibit on illustrator Garth Williams, also in collaboration with the Illustration Institute, had been. Williams illustrated many children’s classics, including “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little,” both by longtime Maine resident E.B. White.

For the McCloskey exhibit, Portland artist Pat Corrigan has created a mural inside the library showing the mother and baby bear from “Blueberries for Sal.”

Sally McCloskey said she’s curious to see which works by her father are in the show. She thinks her father would have been pleased with the show in an “aw shucks” kind of way, as he was never quite comfortable with fame. He was, however, very comfortable in Maine.

“Clearly, Maine was important. ‘Blueberries for Sal,’ ‘One Morning in Maine,’ ‘Time of Wonder,’ and ‘Burt Dow’ were inspired by our coast and its people,” she wrote in her email. “It was the island where we lived, however, that provided a sanctuary for much of what he did.”

An illustration from “Time of Wonder” by Robert McCloskey hangs for an exhibit at Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick. On loan from the May Massee Collection, Emporia State University Special Archives and Collections, Emporia, Kansas. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

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