Alois Carigiet

Alois Carigiet (30 August 1902 – 1 August 1985) was a Swiss graphic designer, painter, and illustrator. He may be known best for six children's picture books set in the Alps, A Bell for Ursli and its sequels, written by Selina Chönz, and three that he wrote himself. In 1966 he received the inaugural Hans Christian Andersen Medal for children's illustrators.

Alois Carigiet was the seventh of eleven children born to Alois Carigiet and Barbara Maria Carigiet, née Lombriser; the actor and comedian Zarli Carigiet was one younger brother. It was a farm family in Trun in the canton of Graubünden, where he grew up and spent his first school years. At home, the family spoke Sursilvan, the local Romansh dialect of the anterior Rhine valley. In 1911, economic hardship forced them to move to the canton's German-speaking capital Chur where his father found employment. This relocation into a more urban environment had a strong impact on the nine-year-old. In retrospect, Carigiet described the move as an "emigration to the low-lands", from a "mountain boy's paradise" to a "gloomy apartment on the ground floor in a narrow town alley".

Carigiet visited primary and secondary schools in Chur, as well as the "Kantonsschule", the canton's gymnasium, which he quit in 1918 in order to start an apprenticeship as a decorative designer and draftsman with master painter Martin Räth. While learning the art of graining, marbleizing, gold plating and other techniques of decorative art in Räth's atelier, Carigiet spent a lot of his spare time filling volumes of sketchbooks with drawings of rural and urban scenes, farm animals and pets, anatomical studies of heads and beaks of the birds exhibited at Chur's natural history museum, as well as with numerous caricatures of his acquaintances and family. Räth noticed the apprentice's talent as well, and one of Carigiet's appointed creations, an assembly of decorated vases for the Siebler & Co. shop windows, seems to have received particular appreciation. Carigiet finished his apprenticeship in 1923, with the highest grade in every subject.

...
Wikipedia