Eric Carle's Food Drawings on Display
Eric Carle, “Walter worked all day and into the night.” Walter the Baker, 1995. Collage of acrylic-painted tissue paper with pen and ink on illustration board.
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art will open a new exhibition this fall exploring Eric Carle’s career through the perspective of food.
Running September 20 through August 23, 2026, Cooking with Eric Carle will feature more than 50 works dating between 1965 and 2019.
From The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Walter the Baker, Eric Carle’s artwork features creatures and characters enjoying all kinds of food. Food played a big role in launching Eric Carle’s career in book publishing which began with commissions for Red Flannel Hash and Shoo-Fly Pie (1965), a compilation of folk recipes from across the United States. When he switched over to his signature collage style, Carle continued to feature food in many of his books, often highlighting his own favorite foods and personal stories.
“I have often fantasized about being a chef,” Eric Carle wrote to a fan who asked him if he ever wanted to be something other than an artist.
Cooking with Eric Carle will examine the role of food in Carle’s work through three sections. Making Meals, Sharing Stories features work from Carle classics including Pancakes, Pancakes! which celebrates the art of starting a meal from scratch. On view in the exhibition is a double-page spread illustrating the steps to making homemade pancake batter. Carle enjoyed making pancakes for breakfast before sitting down to work, a tradition from his childhood in Germany where he would ask his mother for pancakes after gathering an egg and jam from his grandmother’s kitchen.
Carle’s Uncle Walter owned a bakery, and he remembered “all the sweet smells” when he created Walter the Baker (1995), a story about pretzels. A tribute to his beloved uncle and a nod to German folklore tradition, work on view from Walter the Baker shows how Carle painstakingly cut out each individual shape of the baked goods in Walter’s shop, including every single roll and pretzel.
The section Playing with Your Food will feature humorous situations involving food. In Twelve Tales From Aesop (1980) a crow falls prey to a fox’s fake praises. When he opens his beak to respond, his tasty meal of sausages falls right into the fox’s lap. Carle departed from his usual collage style to create pen-and-ink artworks for Otter Nonsense by Norton Juster (1982), author of The Phantom Tollbooth, with whom he shared a love of word play. On view is a playful image of an otter floating in the sea while enjoying cake and coffee, which became the title page illustration.
The final section, Oodles of Doodles, will include many of the informal drawings that Carle created throughout his life. He sketched thank-you notes on receipts, and created abstract works on the lids of yogurts, his daily afternoon snack. Carle also loved honey, especially sweet and spicy pine honey that he imported from Europe, and he featured the treat in My Very First Book of Food (1986). Artworks on view from this book, which are among some of Carle’s smaller and more delicate pieces, show how he creatively divided the board-book format into split vertical pages, challenging pre-literate readers to match two illustrations together.
“Exploring Eric Carle’s artwork through the lens of food and cooking offers a delicious treat of a show for our visitors,” said Jennifer Schantz, executive director of The Carle. “His vibrant artwork allows us to imagine tasting sweet honey, smelling the aroma of pretzels baking, and hearing the sizzle of butter in the pancake pan.”
