Artists As Illustrators in Late 19 and Early 20 Century America
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Artists as Illustrators th in late 19 th and early 20 century America Jay G. Williams According to legend, there lived in ancient times a virgin by the name of Gwenfrewi, who was desired in marriage by Caradog, a prince of Cymru. His request refused, he attempted to carry her off by force. Gwenfrewi fled, pursued by the prince, who in a great rage struck off her head, which bounded down the hill into a vale to a church, and on the spot where it rested a spring of amazing capacity bubbled forth. Gwenfrewi’s uncle, St. Beuno, who was officiating in the church, rushed out, replaced the severed head, and with prayer, restored the virgin to life. Thus was Gwenfrewi Santes born. Artists as Illustrators th in late 19 th and early 20 century America Jay G. Williams 2014 Gwenfrewi Santes Press “Wherever the head rolls.” 2014 Gwenfrewi Santes Press c/o Jay G. Williams Hamilton College Clinton, N.Y. 13323 Table of Contents Introduction 1 Winslow Homer 7 Edwin Abbey 17 Childe Hassam 23 John H. Twachtman 33 Frederic Remington 43 Arthur Bowen Davies 55 William Glackens 65 Maxfield Parrish 73 John Sloan 81 Everett Shinn 91 Arthur Dove 101 George Bellows 109 Conclusions 123 Foreword The pictures used in this work are mainly from my private collection though there are a very few scanned from Hamilton College library holdings. The intent is simply to introduce readers to the illustrative style and scope of the various artists. Needless to say, there are hundreds of illustrations not included in this book. Footnotes and citations are at a minimum in this book because virtually all the facts provided are common knowledge, easily derived from Wikipedia or other sources on the web. It should also be said that there are probably many other artists who might have been included in this work. Again what I have done is exemplary but certainly not exhaustive. I do believe, however, that the illustrative work of these well-known artists is not insignificant and may provide clues for understanding their painted works. Finally, I must add that there are few, if any, conclusions in this book. I provide examples of illustrative work; it is up to the readers to develop their own conclusions. Jay G. Williams 1 Artists as Illustrators th th in late 19 and early 20 century America Introduction Although, as we shall see, several great American artists were also illustrators, many art historians pay little attention to the world of illustration. Most textbooks on American art deal with architecture, sculpture, and perhaps photography as well as painting but scarcely mention magazine and book illustration at all. The reasons are many-fold. If the method used was wood engraving, one learns immediately that there is an intervening step between the drawing and the publication. That is because the engravers have to do their work, a work that subtly interprets and perhaps changes the picture. This was also true of half tone pictures. There is also the problem of commercialization. Editors want pictures that will sell the magazine or book and the illustrator must conform to their wishes. The old saw is that illustration is just a way to make money but has little to do with art. On the other hand, one must remember that the architect’s plan is also interpreted by the builder, that the photograph may be transformed in the darkroom and by the printer, and that all those pictures of paintings used in art text books are different from the paintings themselves. Size, texture, and sometimes color are transformed. Most people recognize the Mona Lisa, not because they have been in Paris to view it, but because they have seen photographs of the work that may not even have been in color. So, in effect, art history also relies upon illustration. In any event, if one wishes to understand “Visual Culture” in late 19th and early 20th century America, one must pay particular attention to newspaper, magazine, and book illustrations. They not only tell us how people at the time dressed, celebrated, played, and loved. They also told people at that time how they should do those things, what was up-to-date and appropriate. Book illustrations often told the reader how to imagine the story. Pictures by Remington and others taught the whole world how to imagine the American West. It is also important to note that most, though not all, illustrators also tried their hand at painting. Some were quite successful; some were not. For instance, Frederick Stuart Church (not to be confused with Frederic E. Church) is represented in several important museums while, as far as I know, Arthur Burdett Frost, another well-known illustrator, is not. In this compilation we will only look at illustrations by artists who are well known for their non-illustrative works of art. That is to say, we will include artists who would be mentioned in an American art course simply because of their painting or sculpture. 1 Before we turn to specific artists, however, it is important to think first about the place of art in 19th Century America. Both Britain and the European Continent had a rich tradition of art going back to ancient Greece and Rome. Much of it was supported either by the Church or by the king and the lords. In America, however, there were no kings or lords. The Church existed, but in a form that frequently rejected religious art as idolatrous. At the beginning of the 19th century, there were no art museums to speak of and only a few wealthy men who were interested in supporting artists. The result was that many men1 with a penchant for art either, like Benjamin West, moved to England or became portrait painters, travelling from one location to another to create what many people did want---a picture for the family home and records. Even that career as a portraitist eventually became somewhat tenuous due to the invention of photography. Louis Daguerre invented a form of photography in 1837 and by 1840 the first camera was patented in America. Samuel F. B. Morse, among others, worked hard to make the camera a useful invention by shortening significantly the time needed for exposure. For many years, however, the equipment was still large and clumsy and quite unsuitable for quick action pictures. Moreover, it took most of the century before photographs could be readily printed in newspapers and magazines. That very fact was a great boon for many artists. By the 1840s, American art also found a new direction in landscape painting. Painters like Thomas Cole, Frederick E. Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Kensett, Asher Durand, et al, commonly known as the Hudson River School, followed the lead of the romantic English painters, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, to produce a vision of America that was both beautiful and unifying. This, they proclaimed, is our land, a vast and still uncorrupted wilderness. It was, however, difficult to reproduce such art in periodicals, for as yet illustrations were uncolored and small. Another style of painting that developed in the pre-Civil War period was genre art and depicted how people lived in America in “the good old days.” Works by William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham represent this sort of painting. When periodical illustration began in earnest, several artists such as Arthur Burdett Frost and Charles Reinhart carried on this tradition in printed form. In the 1840s a major change occurred. English publishers came to the realization that illustrations sold newspapers and magazines. The problem was that steel engraving and lithography were useful for books but too time-consuming to work well for weeklies and monthlies. Wood engraving was o.k. but needed very hard boxwood and that did not grow big enough to produce full page illustrations. So the English publishers found what now appears like an obvious solution---they bolted squares of boxwood together to produce full-page pictures. 1 I use the word “men” advisedly for women, by and large, were not encouraged to pursue careers in art before the Civil War. 2 A white slip was painted on the blocks so the lines between them did not show. The picture was then drawn right on the blocks. Very soon the Illustrated London News came into its own. By the 1850s the idea had spread to America, in part through the work of Henry Carter (who was known primarily through his pseudonym, Frank Leslie) and the era of the illustrated newspaper and magazine had begun. Suddenly there was a great demand both for people with artistic talent and for competent wood engravers who could actually create the engraved blocks for printing. That demand intensified in the 1860s when the Civil War began and newspapers like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated and Harper’s Weekly felt the need to cover visually the war both on and off the battlefield. Photographers, of course, there were---one thinks of Matthew Brady and his staff--- but their work could only be published after it was turned into wood engravings. Photographic illustration did not become common in magazines and newspapers until the 1890s. Wood engraving dominated the periodical industry until late in the 1880s when half-tone engraving that used accumulations of small dots to produce a picture that looked much more like a black and white photograph, made wood engraving obsolete. Sharp lines vanished and were replaced by much more delicate shading. A new revolution had begun. More and more periodicals came into existence, sometimes for a few, brief years, sometimes with a much longer life-span.