Jeanne Mellin

American artist, illustrator and author. Ms. Mellin studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a highly respected equine artist, and has also had experience of breeding, training and judging horses, which gives her equine art a realistic touch. She is something of an authority on Morgan horses. She paints and sculpts and has even produced sculptures for some of the Breyer model horses, but is perhaps best known by pony book readers for her gorgeous illustrations of some of the pony stories of Nancy Caffrey. Nancy Caffrey and Jeanne Mellin were childhood friends and vowed to write and illustrate books together, which they did to some success. More recently Ms. Mellin has also illustrated the Morgan pony series by Ellen Feld

As well as illustrating pony books she has also written some of her own, mainly non-fictional works about riding and various horse breeds, in particular Morgans, but also a children's novel about a Shetland pony.

Jeanne Mellin has her own website, which is mainly slanted towards her art.

Horse & Pony Books:

PIDGY'S SURPRISE
(DUTTON [USA] 1955)
ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR
Reprinted in paperback by Willow Bend Publishing in 2011
EDITION PICTURED: Willow Bend paperback, also pictured original illustration.
SUMMARY: Cindy has a Shetland pony called Pidgy but dreams of her own full sized horse. Can Pidgy persuade his daydreaming owner that she should cherish him, small as he is, instead of thinking about a horse that doesn't even exist?

Collector's Info:
Quite a hard book to find, especially the first edition. The book was reprinted recently in paperback but must have had only a smallish print run as there are not  many copies of that edition to be found either, especially outside the USA.