Dr. Seuss’s Hidden World Of Art

Theodor Seuss Geisel at his easel. © 2018 Dr. Seuss Enterprises, L.P. All Images All Rights Reserved.

Inside Dr Seuss’s Spanish-style home in La Jolla, California, which he shared with his wife Audrey, Geisel were hundreds of drawings, paintings, and taxidermy-like sculptures of animals never classified by a taxonomist.

Theodor Seuss Geisel who once called adults “obsolete children”—had written and illustrated 44 children’s books under the moniker Dr. Seuss at the time of his passing, but he also spent his nights creating what he called his “midnight paintings,” a part of his practice he kept hidden from public view.

Geisel’s time in New York was marked by many early rejections. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1925, he traveled to Paris and soaked in the arts scene at a time when

Surrealism was taking hold of the city. When he returned to the States and relocated from Springfield to Manhattan, he had trouble getting his illustration career off the ground.

But he would make his mark in the advertising world, following a successful campaign for Flit bug spray that read “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” and featured a very Seussian insect slyly whizzing through a woman’s fancy hat.