Adrienne Segur (1901–1981)

Adrienne Segur was born in Athens, Greece. Her parents were Kakia Anastase Diomede Kyriakos and Nicolaos Episcopopoulos, the writer who took the name Nicolas Segur after the family moved to France in 1904. In about 1932, she married the Egyptian poet and thinker Mounir Hafez, 10 years her junior. Segur became a children's book illustrator and her work was popularized by the publishing house Flammarion in the 1950s and 1960s. Among her most popular work was the illustration of Il Etait Une Fois, the beloved fairy tales of Charles Perrault, published in 1934. From 1936 to 1939, Segur was the director of the children's column in Le Figaro, where she made all the illustrations. She is perhaps best-known for her illustration of The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, a selection of 28 traditional stories from the French, German, Danish, Russian, and Japanese traditions, published in English in the USA in 1958. Segur stopped drawing a short time before the publication of The Legend of Venise in 1973 due to arthritis.