Charitableness - Showing genuine caring and having a gracious spirit toward others.

Jan Brett’s birthday is on December 1st.

New York Times best-selling author-illustrator Jan Brett was born in 1949 in Massachusetts, where she grew up and where she still lives, splitting her time between a seacoast village and a summer home in the Berkshire Hills. She studied art at the Boston Museum School and spent many hours perusing the paintings, sculptures, and examples of textiles and ceramics at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. This experience made a deep impression on her, influencing her imagination. In an interview, she has said that “I’m delighted and surprised when fragments of these beautiful images come back to me in my painting.”

Jan married Boston Symphony bassist Joseph Hearne in 1980, and together the two have traveled the world, providing ongoing inspiration for Jan’s detailed illustrations that depict many different cultures and natural habitats, while remaining whimsical and imaginative. She recalls seeming to enter into a separate reality when reading picture books as a child, and explains that this is the experience she’s trying to give her readers: “Now I try to recreate that feeling of believing that the imaginary place I’m drawing really exists. The detail in my work helps to convince me, and I hope others as well, that such places might be real.”