The fall of the House of Tudor

Painting the simple life made her a fortune. Now, a Vt. artist's children are at war over it

In this undated photo released by the family of Tasha Tudor, the illustrator is seen in Vermont.

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. - Her romantic watercolors and sketches of old-fashioned family farm life made Tasha Tudor a beloved children's illustrator. The clever marketing of her back-to-basics lifestyle - weaving and gardening while raising goats, chickens, and children on her New England farm - made Tudor a cult hero to craftswomen, an unconventional Martha Stewart.

But Tudor's death last June exposed a much less endearing image of the eccentric artist's own family. Three of her four children were cut out of her will almost entirely. The 92-year-old artist left her home, her copyrights and her business - called "Tasha Tudor & Family" - to one son and grandson who still cultivate her brand. The other three children are contesting the will in Marlboro Probate Court, accusing their brother, Seth, of wielding improper influence over their mother to claim an estate worth more than $2 million. Seth, in court papers, has branded the claims as a baseless attack on a valid will.

The dispute over the estate was frustratingly easy to anticipate, said Tudor's youngest child, Efner Tudor Holmes, now 60. She says she warned her mother before they stopped talking to each other in 1996 that an earlier version of the will was dividing the family.

"Some of the last words she said to me were, 'Oh, will there ever be a cat and dogfight when I die. But I don't care. I won't be here to see it,' " Holmes said in an interview in her rustic farmhouse. "It bothered her - but not enough to do anything about it. I think there's a side of my mother that was very cruel. And that's the side of her that I'm wrestling with to this day."

The familial rancor contrasts starkly with the idyllic family life that Tudor depicted in the gentle watercolors and sketches she crafted over 70 years. Evocative of the work of Beatrix Potter, Tudor's illustrations recalled simpler times and featured precious children whom she often named after and modeled on her own children.

Her ambitious creativity as a mother was memorialized in a 1955 Life magazine piece detailing an elaborate doll wedding she staged in her yard. In her book, "Becky's Birthday," she commemorated her practice of floating a birthday cake, alight with candles, down the river to her daughter, Bethany.

But in her will, Tasha Tudor is perfunctory. "I make no further provision for my daughters, Efner Tudor Holmes and Bethany Tudor Phoenix, in consideration of the property I have given them during my life and in consideration of our estrangement." She left them each $1,000.

Now, Bethany Tudor is 68 and living in a West Brattleboro mobile home filled with pet birds; she recently applied for low-income housing. She declined to be interviewed. Thomas Tudor, 63, is associate general counsel for international affairs for the US Air Force and lives in Fairfax Station, Va. He said he was getting letters from his mother until she was too weak to write; he didn't think he was estranged from her as her will states. Holmes is running a Hopkinton, N.H., farm and an excavating business with her husband, living off the land as her mother did, though not to such an extreme.

Seth Tudor builds furniture, and with his wife, Marjorie, and grandson, Winslow, remains deeply involved in upholding the Tudor traditions. They give $165-a-head garden tours of Tudor's oft-photographed English garden and hold workshops to teach marionette-making and botanical illustration. They are trying to form a Tasha Tudor museum and through their Tasha Tudor and Family website recently launched online sales of goods like greeting cards, cookie cutters and tea cozies in her name. It would not surprise many that Tudor left her son, Seth, her Marlboro farmhouse: He's the one credited with building it, using only hand tools, in the 1970s.

But the blunt favoritism of the will stunned Seth Tudor's siblings and made Holmes question her mother all over again.

"She has a set of fans who think she's the goddess of family. If that's what she did to them, that's fine. I don't want to destroy that," said Holmes. But later, she added, "It's just that it wasn't what people thought it was . . . That's what bothers me about Seth and his family. They're trying to keep this mystique going and it's to make money."

Seth Tudor and his attorney, Richard H. Coutant, declined to be interviewed for this story. But in court papers, Coutant called the claims against his client unfounded. "Seth Tudor intends to defend the integrity of Tasha Tudor's disposition of her own estate and of her choice of him as her executor," Coutant said in court papers last August.

Tasha Tudor became famous for her willingness to live the uncompromising rural life she envisioned and to whittle it into a life of beauty - effortlessly weaving baskets and staging marionette shows, growing elaborate gardens and churning and molding butter. Born in 1915 to well-connected Boston parents, Tudor never quite fit in with her time or place. She wore 1830s-style dresses and bonnets and retreated to remote New England farms, first to a Webster, N.H., house with no running water and later to the cottage in Vermont. She divorced two husbands who did not hew to her agrarian dream. The children's father, Thomas McCready, later died.

"She was totally involved in fantasy. She wanted to live in her own little world," said Thomas Tudor, the third of the children. "I found that when I was a teenager, it was very difficult to get back into reality."

What was magical to a child could be strange and alienating for a teenager. Their mother forbade the girls from wearing pants or cutting their long hair. "As a young child, I remember it being pretty embarrassing wearing homespun clothes, my mother wearing a shawl and a long skirt," said Thomas Tudor.

Their mother played with dolls. She not only made the dolls clothing; she designed catalogues of the dolls' clothes, and her dolls sent letters to one another through the "Sparrow Post." Her children ordered clothes for their stuffed animals from the catalogue, in a practice she also wrote about in her books.

But Tudor disliked babies; she often said she would rather hold one of her beloved Corgi dogs, said Holmes. And while Tudor worked on the art that sustained her family, the children ran wild. "There was no structure whatsoever," recalled Thomas Tudor, who learned early how to make his own dinner. Holmes recalled that their mother discouraged them from playing with neighborhood children and frowned upon the modern ways of outsiders. Later, she despised her children's spouses and was critical of her grandchildren, said Thomas Tudor. In her will, Tudor acknowledged only five of her biological grandchildren, leaving out five adopted ones - as well as three born to her estranged daughter, Holmes.

"Efner and I feel delighted to escape that dark environment," said Thomas Tudor.

Thomas Tudor is represented by nationally known attorney Mark D. Schwartz, of Bryn Mawr, Pa., who also represented the children of violinist Isaac Stern in a 2004 dispute over his estate. Years ago, Tudor herself hired Schwartz to reclaim the copyrights to her books, which she had signed over to a publishing colleague.

"I've done a number of these cases. They get very ugly," said Schwartz. "They address things that people wouldn't want to otherwise see. And unless they're resolved at the outset, everybody loses."

As interested parties in the case, Holmes and Bethany Tudor have filed angry letters about their brother in Probate Court. In one, Bethany Tudor - who was also estranged from her mother - objected to Seth being named by his mother as executor of the will. "I feel he used undue influence upon my mother when she was not well these last years," she wrote in a letter to the court. Seth was "unfairly using what rightfully should have been divided between the four siblings," she wrote.

Last week in a Marlboro District Probate Court room, Holmes challenged Seth Tudor about whether a public memorial service held for Tudor's fans - without inviting his siblings - violated their mother's wishes. In her will, Tudor called for no funeral or viewing and asked that her ashes be buried with those of her dogs and pet rooster, Chickahominy, beneath her garden's Mystery Rose.

Seth Tudor defended the ceremony held on Sept. 12, which would have marked Tudor's 93d birthday. "I didn't organize it. I didn't suggest it. I didn't run it," Seth Tudor said in court.

Probate Court Judge Robert M. Pu frowningly stated the obvious as he named a special administator to handle the estate's taxes and help determine the true value of the estate: "It's impossible for you folks to agree."

In an interview, Holmes said she does not want to appear bitter about all this. She says she came to terms with her mother long ago and saw her three weeks before she died. "She said, 'Efner, your hands are so big and so strong.' I said, 'Mom, they're your hands.' "

In hindsight, Holmes admires her mother for many of the same reasons her fans do: By her own design, Tudor supported four children with her books and illustrations and ran a 500-acre farm alone. She lived a life that would have broken most women, Holmes said. "She did her best," Holmes said. "As a woman and a mother, I understand that."

Stephanie Ebbert can be reached at ebbert@globe.com