Artist who did backgrounds for classic Disney films dead at 84

Tuesday, July 25, 2000 | 10:19 a.m.

The artist died Thursday of esophageal cancer, according to Joan and Eyvind Earle Publishing of Monterey.

Earle came to Walt Disney's attention in the early 1950s when he created the look for the animated short "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom," which won both an Oscar and a Cannes Film Festival award.

For the rest of the decade, Disney kept him busy painting the settings for such stories as "Peter Pan," "Paul Bunyan" and ' 'Lady and the Tramp."

For "Sleeping Beauty," he not only did the movie's magical, medieval background, but also the Disneyland dioramas for Sleeping Beauty"s Castle.

Earle was already a well established artist when Disney discovered him, having had his first exhibition in France when he was 13.

He was showing his work in galleries in Hollywood and Beverly Hills when he was 20, and when he was 21 he bicycled across the country, paying his way by painting watercolors. He was 23 when he sold his first watercolor to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He began adapting his landscapes to Christmas cards in the 1940s, eventually painting more than 800 designs that have sold more than 300 million copies.

Earle began painting when he was 10, after his father challenged him to either paint a picture a day or read 50 pages a day. He chose to do both.

After his parents divorced, he traveled the world with his father for a time, painting in such exotic locales as Mexico, Cuba, Spain, Holland, Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Crosica.

The New York native eventually returned to the United States, settling in Los Angeles with his mother. There, he dropped out of high school shortly before graduation to take a job as a sketch artist at United Artists studios.