Longtime Edgartown resident Jennifer Clarke Low Oliver, a children’s book illustrator and New Yorker cover artist, died Thursday, Oct. 29, from complications of ALS. She was 70.
Her 28 covers for the New Yorker magazine in the late ’70s and ’80s ranged from Thanksgiving and Valentine’s holiday depictions to home settings and peaceful nature scenes, many based on places on the Vineyard, where she lived and painted from for the past 40 years. A stately old Victorian house in the Williams Street historic district in Vineyard Haven, now owned by April and Michael Levandowski of LeRoux, appeared as a New Yorker cover in September of 1983.
Born in Bloomington, Ind., Jenni, as she was known, attended Guilford College in North Carolina and Massachusetts College of Art before moving to Martha’s Vineyard from Cambridge. Her career with the New Yorker started in the late ’60s with pen and ink illustrations, called spot drawings, that would accompany articles. She did hundreds of these for the weekly magazine. For several years, issues might have four or five of her spot drawings.
After the art director asked her to submit a painting for the cover, the magazine bought 35 of her paintings, 28 of which appeared and can still be purchased today as prints. The cover paintings were interesting in that they never had a person, but always showed an activity done by a person who had just left the scene, such as book on a park bench or a pile of leaves with a rake leaning against a tree alongside a long driveway entrance. She once said she liked the ambiguity: “I think people who look at my covers can make up their own story.”
“She had fan letters from around the world,” said her husband, Edly Oliver. The couple, who both attended Massachusetts College of Art, had recently celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.
Jenni also had a successful career illustrating children’s books, about nine in all, including the well-known “January Brings the Snow,” by Sara Coleridge. Later on, her love of animals led her to start painting animal portraits on the Vineyard, and here too, her creativity became known. A portrait for Harold and Majorie Rogers of West Tisbury included all the pets they had ever owned — about 25 to 30 animals. Word of mouth spread, and she was commissioned to do a number of these.
At the yearly Agricultural Fair, Jenni could often be found hand-washing cows before judging commenced. She once entered her pet cow of 25 years, Daylilly, who also graced the cover of the New Yorker one year. Jenni was known locally as being a very kind, giving person.
Jenni and her husband moved to the Vineyard in 1968, not long after her parents, the late Joseph and Ruth Low, bought land in Chilmark. Her father, Joseph, was a children’s book writer and illustrator, and a graphic designer who had a number of New Yorker covers himself between 1940 and 1984.
She is survived by her husband, Edward “Edly” Lee Oliver Jr.; her sister, Damaris Botwick of Chatham, N.Y.; sisters-in-law Annette Oliver Smith and Susan Oliver Coxe; and brothers-in-law Theodore Oliver and Bill Coxe, all of Charlotte, N.C.
Jenni donated her body for ALS research. A memorial gathering will be held at a future date.
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