[3][4] Brian Wildsmith was born in 1930 in Penistone, a small market town in the West Riding, now in South Yorkshire, England.
He was educated at the De La Salle College for Boys in Sheffield, but from the age of seventeen studied at the Barnsley School of Art (1946–1949).
From Barnsley he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he studied for three years (1949–1952), and where Sir William Coldstream was among his teachers.
Mabel George of Oxford University Press, whom he first met in 1957, gave him his first opportunity when she commissioned from him, as an experiment, some illustrations for Arabian Nights (1961).
From 1971 Wildsmith lived in France at Castellaras, a hill village near Cannes and Grasse, with his wife, Aurélie, and their four children, Clare, Rebecca, Anna and Simon.
[1] Four of his works were subsequently commended runners-up[a] for the Medal, all published by Oxford University Press: Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Edward Blishen, 1963; The Lion and the Rat: A Fable, by Jean de La Fontaine (1668), adapted from Aesop, also 1963; Birds, 1967; and The Owl and the Woodpecker, 1971.