Jacket for The Muffin Child

This is the jacket for Stephen Menick’s The Muffin Child (Philomel Books, 1998). The original painting is in oil over acrylic on watercolor paper and was included in the Society of Illustrators 41st Annual Exhibition.

The novel is set in a village in the Balkans in 1913, so I used my Eastern European-looking grandmother as model for the face of Tanya, the title character. Here is her passport photo (on the right) and that of her twin sister, taken in 1906 or 1907 - the same day they posed for a family portrait.

Subsequently, though, I’ve learned that my grandmother, who was born in Rudna, which was then in Hungary, but is now in Romania, was not Romanian, Hungarian, let alone Balkanian, but a Banat Swabian of French-German extraction.