Bill Peet - Early Life

Early Life

Bill Peet was born in Grandview, Indiana, in 1915. Peet began drawing at an early age, and filled tablets full of sketches. Often, instead of doing lessons, Peet would draw in the margins of his textbooks—which were very popular for their added illustrations when he sold them back. Animals were always a love of Peet's. He and his friends would go traipsing through the woods looking for frogs, tadpoles, minnows and crawfish. Most of his adventures as a boy to catch animals were in the hope that he could capture them and sketch them. The young Peet would also sneak onto greeting parties at the train station as a boy just to see the train's mechanical workings. In addition, as a teen, he would try to sketch the circus big top, but he was always in the way of the set up crew. He memorized the scene and would reconstruct it from memory.

It was about this time Peet entered into Arsenal Technical High School. At first, he had little interest in pursuing a career as an artist. However, after failing all his classes but physical education, he followed the advice of a friend and took some art classes. Peet did extremely well, and experimented with a broad range of media. He eventually received a scholarship to the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, where he attended for three years. In the first class, Bill found himself very interested in a girl that sat in the front row. That girl, Margaret Brunst, eventually became his wife in 1937. Peet took quite a few painting classes that first year, and he admitted his paintings were always somewhat macabre. His favorite subjects were grizzled old men, “perfected with age, like a gnarled oak tree.” Another favorite subject was the circus—but always the big tops, never the people.