Tasha Tudor | Children's illustrator, 92

Tasha Tudor, 92, a children's illustrator whose pastel watercolors and delicately penciled lines depicted an idyllic, old-fashioned vision of the 19th-century way of life she famously pursued - including weaving, spinning, gathering eggs and milking goats - died Wednesday at her home in Marlboro, Vt.

A cottage industry grew out of Ms. Tudor's art, which has illustrated nearly 100 books. The family sells greeting cards, prints, plates, aprons, dolls, quilts and more, all in a sentimental, rustic, but still refined style resembling that of Beatrix Potter.

Ms. Tudor's favorite of all her books was

Corgiville Fair

, one of several she wrote about the Welsh corgi dogs she kept as pets, sometimes 13 or 14 at once. Her 1963 illustrated version of

The Secret Garden

, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, tells of children enraptured by a mysterious garden. The volume of Clement C. Moore's

Night Before Christmas

that she illustrated remains popular.

Two of Ms. Tudor's books were named Caldecott Honor Books:

Mother Goose

(1944) and

1 Is One

(1956). Ms. Tudor was recently awarded the Regina Medal by the Catholic Library Association.

Starling Burgess, who later legally changed her name to Tasha Tudor, was born in Boston to well-connected but not wealthy parents. Her mother, Rosamond Tudor, was a portrait painter, and her father, William Starling Burgess, was a yacht and airplane designer who collaborated with Buckminster Fuller.

Ms. Tudor could not remember a time when she did not draw pictures or make little books. She was originally nicknamed Natasha by her father, after Tolstoy's heroine in

War and Peace

. This was shortened to Tasha. After her parents divorced when she was 9, Tudor adopted her mother's last name.

In 1938, she married Thomas Leighton McCready Jr., who was in the real estate business. She and her husband moved to a 19th-century farmhouse in New Hampshire that lacked electricity and running water, but did have 17 rooms and 450 acres. Tudor painted in the kitchen, in between baking bread and washing dishes. She created a dollhouse with a cast of characters, two of whom were married in a ceremony covered by Life magazine.

Ms. Tudor was divorced from McCready, who later died, and from a second husband, Allan John Woods. In 1972, she sold the New Hampshire farm and moved onto her property near her son Seth in Marlboro.

- N.Y. Times News Service