Shelf Candy Saturday #17: National Velvet, by Enid Bagnold

This wonderful book meme/blog hop

is hosted by

Stephanie @

Five Alarm Book Reviews!!

The purpose of this feature is to display

a beautiful book cover,

with information, if available,

about the cover illustrator,

photographer, and/or designer.

For all the participation rules,

just click

HERE.

Here's my pick for this week!

National Velvet

Enid Bagnold

Paperback, 246 pages

Mammoth

(an imprint of Egmont

Children's Books Limited)

2000

(originally published in 1935)

Genre: Horse Fiction, YA

Why do I love this cover?

Well, first of all, I love horses!  ( I guess that's pretty obvious by now...lol.)  I first started reading books about them around the age of 11 or 12, and, for several years thereafter, I devoured every horse-related novel I came across!  I not only read National Velvet, but also most of The Black Stallion books, by Walter Farley, Man O'War, also by Walter Farley, the Flicka trilogy (My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, Green Grass of Wyoming), by Mary O'Hara, King of the Wind, by Marguerite Henry, and many other assorted horse stories.

Next, I think the horse on this cover is superbly painted!  He has a beautiful profile, with all those delicately shaded areas.  His nose looks so soft...I feel as if I could almost touch it, and can even imagine him softly snorting, as he stands next to his owner, Velvet.  Oh, I want to pet him so badly...

His mane is stirred by a strong breeze, and this is echoed in Velvet's hair.  They're both looking toward the sunset, or is it the dawn?  This is not only very realistic, but also tells me that horse and rider are united in the pursuit of one goal.  The cover symbolically depicts this, adding to my admiration of this artist's skill!

Velvet, the main character in this book, calls her horse "The Pie", because he's a piebald.  According to Wikipedia, a piebald can be any animal "...that has a spotting pattern of large unpigmented, usually white, areas of hair, feathers, or scales and normally pigmented patches, generally black."  If you take a look at the left-hand edge of this cover, you'll see that the horse has dark patches along his neck.  I'm glad the artist didn't place any patches on his face, though.  I think it looks so beautiful as it is -- just plain white!

The artist who created this

gorgeous cover is

Chris Chapman!!

You can see many of his

paintings at the link above.

I tried to find this particular

book illustration, with more information

on how it was created,

but was unable to.

I did find another site with

other book illustrations by

Chapman, but am wondering if

this is the same person.

You can find those illustrations

HERE.

You can access Chapman's

website HERE.

So what do you think 

of this cover?

What beautiful cover(s) 

are you featuring this week?