Nicolas Sidjakov

Who was Nicolas Sidjakov?

Nicolas Sidjakov was a Latvian-born American commercial artist and illustrator.

Sidjakov was born in Riga, Latvia. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, worked in advertising, and freelanced for the French movie industry. In 1954 he moved to the United States and continued to work in advertising. He also began to illustrate children's books, mainly picture books, beginning with The Friendly Beasts by Laura Nelson Baker, adapted from "The Friendly Beasts", an English Christmas carol. It was published in 1957 by Parnassus Press of Berkeley, California.

Parnassus was a small press established only that year by Herman Schein, whose wife Ruth Robbins was a writer and illustrator. During the next several years it published at least three picture books created by Robbins, as writer, and Sidjakov. The first was Baboushka and the Three Kings, retelling the "Russian folktale about an old woman's endless search for the Christ child". For that work he received the annual Caldecott Medal from the American Library Association in 1961, as illustrator of the previous year's "most distinguished American picture book for children".