Schellen-Ursli

Swiss artist Alois Carigiet was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Prize, the most prestigious award in the field, for his contribution to the development of children’s literature. The category for illustrators was introduced in 1966, ten years after the prize was founded, and Carigiet became its first laureate.

In fact, Alois Carigiet did not intend to illustrate children’s books. After completing his studies, he worked for four years in the Zurich advertising agency of Max Dalang, where he achieved recognition among local artists and designers and opened his own art studio. It produced a wide variety of artistic work – from making holiday decorations to creating political posters, and was quite a successful city enterprise.

In addition, Alois Carigiet was involved in the development of stage costumes and scenery, was a set designer for the Zurich City Theater and one of the organizers of the popular cabaret “Gherkin”.

But Carigiet’s greatest success came with the creation of a diorama for the Swiss pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris.

In the early 1940s, the writer Selina Höntz invited the artist to illustrate her story about “Schellen-Ursli”, an adaptation of a fairy tale well known to many generations of Swiss children. The story of a teenager who sets himself the goal of getting the largest cowbell in the village from a shepherd’s hut in the mountains and leading the traditional procession at the farewell to winter festival has become a real national myth today.

Carigiet worked on the illustrations for almost five years – he could not come up with an image of Ursli that he was satisfied with. The book was published in October 1945; it was subsequently translated into ten languages ​​and its total circulation was about 1.7 million copies. Schöntz wrote several more sequel books, six of which were illustrated by Alois Carigiet.

And in the 1960s, Carigiet wrote and illustrated several of his own picture books (“Zottel, Zick und Zwerg”, “Eine Geschichte von drei Geissen”, “Birnbaum, Birke, Berberitze” and others).

The tale of Ursli and other books may have overshadowed Carigiet’s other talents and even damaged his career as an “adult” artist. But one thing is clear – he always worked on book illustrations with joy and pleasure.

Even when he no longer published children’s books, he was very pleased to hear that all over Switzerland, children still fell asleep in the evenings with a book about Ursli under their pillow. In his own words, it was very important for him to address, first of all, children living in the “gray residential areas of big cities,” telling them about what childhood can be like at the foot of the peaks, illuminated by the rays of the mountain sun.