A Child's Garden of Verses by Stevenson, Robert Louis - 1905

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905. First edition thus. Hardcover. Very Good. 4to. [4], v-xii, [2], 3-124, [2] pp. Black cloth with gold lettering on the spine, color pictorial inset illustration on the front board; top edge gilt. Illustrated by a pictorial title page, twelve color plates by Jessie Wilcox Smith, and numerous in-text illustrations. Baumgarten 203. Norman Rockwell Museum, Illustration History, "Jessie Wilcox Smith". Stevenson's book of children's rhymes and fairy tales, dedicated to his childhood nurse Alison Cunningham, who lay awake with him when he was sick. The first edition illustrated by Jessie Wilcox Smith, arguably the most famous American illustrator of children's books. Smith was famous for her ability to acutely capture the moods and expressions of children in her drawings. Wilcox Smith worked in the Golden Age of American illustration, completing work for Haper's, Collier's, Scribner's, Good Housekeeping, the Ladies Home Journal, and other magazines. Wilcox Smith trained under Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute, and there met Elizabeth Shippen Green and Violet Oakley. Wilcox Smith would go on to form an artistic consortium with these women, all of whom achieved notoriety as American illustrators. Her illustrations gave life to tales like Mother Goose, Little Women, The Water Babies, and others. A lovely copy, replete with sensitive images of children and the child's powerful imagination. A Very Good book with minor rubbing to the extremities and a small separation between the backstrip and the top textblock. A 1909 Christmas gift inscription on the first blank leaf.