DALLAS, TX.- The photograph that graces the cover of Nathalia Holt's acclaimed The Queens of Animation, just now out in paperback, is that of Mary Blair at a desk in South America, brush in fingers, radiant designs at hand. Because, yes, there were other queens of animation; other women "who transformed the world of Disney and made cinematic history," as the subtitle tells, among them Grace Huntington, Bianca Majolie, Sylvia Holland and Retta Scott.

But there were queens, and then there was the woman who sat alone on the throne: Mary Blair. The painter from Oklahoma to whom Walt Disney once said, "You know about colors I have never heard of." The artist whose conceptual paintings for such films as Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Cinderella are "as delicious as feasting on rainbows," her biographer John Canemaker once wrote. The woman who "changed Disney forever," as the Christian Science Monitor wrote in October 2011, when a Google Doodle marked her 100th birthday.

Mary Blair was, in short, Walt's favorite.

She is one of Heritage Auctions', too: Blair's breathtaking works are the centerpiece of the Dallas-based auction house's Dec. 11-13 Animation Art event, with some four dozen Blair originals available – among them, the single largest collection of Alice in Wonderland works ever brought to market. There are also numerous works from Peter Pan and Cinderella and other films, as well as concept paintings for the It's a Small World attraction that became a Mary Blair masterpiece wrought larger than life.

Just as significantly, Heritage's Animation Art event features the only piece of Blair's art also signed by Walt Disney (Roy, too): a painting made in the 1940s for Disney's art director, color stylist and eventual Imagineer Ken Anderson, one of Blair's closest friends. The painting titled To Good King Andersonia ... Supreme Ruler House of Orange has never before been available to collectors.

"Some of the most talented artists ever worked in field of animation, and Mary Blair is certainly at the top of that list," says Jim Lentz, Heritage Auctions' Director of Animation Art. "We're extraordinarily proud to offer so many of her finest works in this month's event."

Well documented is Blair's journey from her birthplace in McAlester, Okla., to Texas to San Jose to Los Angeles' Chouinard Art Institute to Disney's world. In fact, so consequential are Blair's contributions to Disney's oeuvre from 1940 to 1953 — and Golden Books afterward — that her life story has been chronicled in several books, many aimed at young readers and aspiring artists. Her artwork, too, has been the subject of myriad exhibitions, including one six years ago at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.

Blair, who died in 1978 at 66, likely would have been pleased to know her work endures and that it's considered fine art all these decades later — suitable for framing and hanging on gallery walls, its desirability and worth sharply rising with each passing year. As Holt writes in The Queens of Animation of the painter whose early works were watercolors that looked like Dust Bowl still lifes, "Even as a young child, Mary placed the highest value on artistic expression."

This is evident in her earliest works for Disney — among them, the hallucinatory concept art of dancing blooms for the unmade film Fiesta of the Flowers, which Walt had hoped to produce after returning from his landmark goodwill trip to South America in 1941. It was during that sojourn with Disney and others that Blair was transformed — where her colors became brighter and bolder, her forms more expressive and emphatic, and when her envious male colleagues began calling her "Marijuana Blair," a nickname that "mocked her eccentric color choices," Holt writes.

The Dec. 11-13 event is rife with 1940s Blair, most essentially her 1941 concept art for Dumbo, her first film work for Disney – and a rare offering made before she accompanied Disney to South America. It looks at first glance to be nothing more than birds on a wire, but upon closer inspection is a first draft of The Crows who teach an elephant to fly. Also available is an early look at a scene from Lady and the Tramp, of dogs singing "Silent Night" outside a snow-covered home on Christmas — another glimpse at Blair still finding her own voice.

Here, too, are her pieces made for 1946's Song of the South; 1948's live-action animated film So Dear to My Heart; and the 1948 animated musical compilation Melody Time, for which Blair was responsible for the art direction (including the conceptual painting of Pecos Bill on his horse Widowmaker).




Of course it's her 1950s work for which Blair is most remembered and revered, beginning with 1950's Cinderella for which she "chose unusual palettes not merely for her own pleasure but to help shape the narrative," Holt writes. "Each sequence she designed was basic in its use of lines — the key to cutting costs — but full of unexpected burses of color that distracted the eye and saturated the scenes with a sense of opulence."

That's on display in each of the seven works available here, including the grand conceptual art for the scene in which Cinderella, joined by her bloodhound Bruno, is presented with her magic carriage by her Fairy Godmother — including mice turned into horses. From the scene in which Cinderella is gifted with her new dress to the near-midnight dance with Prince Charming to the never-used rendering of a dream sequence in which Cinderella serenades her prince upon a cloud, Blair imbued each fairy-tale moment with the right dashes of "colorful whimsy [and] upside-down conceptualizations," as her official Disney biography would later read.

Blair's "angular sense of geography was not only essential to the film's lengthy pre-production phase, but much of it (in a modified sense) actually wound up in the finished movie," says the studio's bio. "In a way, it was a movie made up entirely of the abandoned dream sequences she had devised for Cinderella."

Next came Alice in Wonderland, in 1951, which resulted in some of her most unforgettable work — 16 pieces of which are available in the December event, including the scene in which Alice grows taller than the treetops, the moment she meets Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, and several peeks at the Mad Hatter's tea party.

What makes all of these pieces even more extraordinary is that Blair struggled with them as she tried to make narrative sense of the whimsical nonsense in Lewis Carroll and Sir John Tenniel's original work. She famously complained the story lacked plot and realized "that to faithfully render the novel's literary absurdity," Holt wrote, "she needed to create images that mirrored Carroll's whimsy."

That realization is on abundant display throughout the work, so much so it feels as though Alice has fallen down the rabbit hole and brought along Blair to document the surreal journey with her paintbrush (and a certain hookah-smoking caterpillar as sidekick and tour guide). In time her work on Alice in Wonderland so consumed Blair it became something of an obsession at all costs to her family life; as a result, it's among the most intimate animated classics of all time, the portrait of a woman who found herself at the doorstep of the Queen of Hearts' castle and didn't want to leave.

But eventually, in 1953, Blair made her way from Wonderland to Neverland, using as her road map early sketches and preliminary paintings made by female colleagues whose work Disney discarded while the studio wrestled with J.M. Barrie's work (in which Peter was a rather unlikable lad).

Seven of Blair's Peter Pan paintings are included in Heritage Auctions' Animation Art event, each as indelible as the next: Peter and Tinkerbell introducing the Darling children to Neverland; Hook and Smee rowing toward Skull Island; Peter carrying Wendy across the Jolly Roger's anchor chain; and Neverland itself, shrouded by swirls of purple and hues of blue.

Pouring herself into so much over so short a span took its toll on Blair, who left Disney after Peter Pan to pursue second, third, four careers as a maker of ads, a writer and illustrator of children's books and a designer of fashionable clothes and theatrical sets and retailers' storefronts. She returned only when Disney summoned her to help create a "boat ride celebrating the children of the world" (as Holt writes) for the 1964's World Fair in New York City.

In time, her drawings for the exhibition — "the most interesting job I've ever had," she said — led to the creation of It's a Small World. Four renderings of the project are included in this event, including a large painting of the hot air balloons on display during the Dutch portion of the ride.

"Her ideas burst with color and texture, the patterns colliding unexpectedly," Holt writes of Blair's renderings, many of which are displayed at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim.

Ultimately Disney loved Blair because they saw the world the same way — as a place "full of wonder," the author writes, imbued with "a sense of pure childhood joy unspoiled by years of painful adulthood." It's evident throughout the Blair works offered in the December event.

"With this amazing collection of Blair originals in this auction, it's quite easy to see why she was Disney's favorite," Lentz says. "It's just one masterpiece of color after another."