100 Years of Illustration

Elizabeth Shippen Green: An Appreciation

I think that the following illustrations represent Elizabeth Shippen Green's best work. She had mastered her technique of sparkling watercolor glazes over solid charcoal drawings and yet, in the last color image seen below, she began painting in opaque colors. Personally, I don't like the direction she took and show only one such example. There are also two ink drawings that appear very derivative of her teacher Howard Pyle's pen renderings. The full view images may be enlarged, the closeups cannot.

"He Gazed at Her His Face Smiling," an illustration for "Tiphaiine la Fée" for the April 1906 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine.

"She Was Lying Back Watching Him, in the Great Chair," another illustration for "Tiphaiine la Fée" for the April 1906 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine.

"She Heard Him Speak to Someone Below," probably an illustration for another chapter of "Tiphaiine la Fée" which appeared in a later issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine for August 1907.

She looks to be drawn from the same model. The face is exquisite and the rest of the illustration: pose, drapery, background and all, is masterfully done.

"Miguela, Kneeling Still, Put it to her Lips," an illustration for "The Spanish Jade" for the September 1906 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine.

Another exquisite model and a superb illustration.

"Jehane – The Constant Lover," an illustration for "The Navarrese" by James Branch Cabell for the September 1906 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine.

"Giséle," one of Green's most memorable illustrations. It appeared in the October 1908 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine. Compare the beauty and impact of this superb work with the image below.

"The Arbor," one of four paintings for "The Child in the Garden," featured in the December 1914 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine. I don't know what the editors could have been thinking when they ran with these. However, Green may have fallen under other influences. She married Huger Elliott, a Philadelphia architect, in 1911 when she was 40 years old. Elliott soon became director of the Rhode Island School of Design and this may have influenced her to begin painting in a traditional way. She had, after all, studied in her youth with a great American painter, Thomas Eakins. Mary Cassatt was also an early influence. We can only speculate. Green continued to paint in this way for years to come and the results were stiff and unengaging.

"The Spirit of Life in All Things was Luminous." An illustration for "The Mansion" in the December 1910 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine.

Illustration for "The White People" by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a lead story in the December 1916 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine. Though the illustration and even the lettering reminds us of Howard Pyle, the drawing is dull and uninteresting. A pity she didn't stay with what she knew best how to do.

Elizabeth Shippen Green - 2

This appeared in Harper's Monthly Magazine for August 1902 and is a good example of Green's charcoal technique coupled with her appreciation of the art and decorations she became fond of during her six years of study and travel in Europe during the last decade of the XIXth Century. Richard Le Gallienne was famous as an English poet who travelled in avant-garde circles with other luminaries such as Oscar Wilde and the great caricaturist Max Beerbohm.

Click on the following images to enlarge.

It's a pity that reproduction was so poor in the magazine. Fortunately, we now have access to computer programs that allow us to digitally clean up and enhance images that are dark and smudgy. It must have quite a coup for Green to be assigned the illustrations for Le Gallienne's Perdita stories that appeared in several issues of Harper's for that year.

Charcoal on board printed with a tint block for an earlier Perdita story from Harper's Monthly Magazine for March 1902. This was probably drawn with the help of photos as reference.

We know from documents in the Library of Congress that Green was one of the early users of photos to help her with the poses of characters in her illustrations. This, from Harper's Monthly Magazine for June 1905 was done with the aid of a photo, entitled "Girl Kneeling," a gelatin silver print in the collection of Ben and Jane Eisenstat. The link is courtesy of the Swann Gallery and the Library of Congress exhibition of Green's work entitled A Petal from the Rose.

Here are two more which look to have been done with the aid of photos from Harper's Monthly Magazine for October 1905.

These two, in color, are from Harper's Monthly Magazine for December 1904 and a story entitled, "The Thousand Quilt." Watercolor over charcoal appears to be the medium used.

Elizabeth Shippen Green - 1

I've probably got more illustrations by Elizabeth Shippen Green than of her teacher and mentor, Howard Pyle [see archives for December 2004 and January 2005], so please bear with me as these posts continue and I document some of her remarkable career with scans of her work that appeared in the magazines of 100 years ago, give or take a decade or two. She was as prolific as any of her contemporaries and she lived a long, full life. Click on the images to enlarge them.

This photograph is entitled Elizabeth Shippen Green in her studio at the Red Rose Inn, circa 1903, and is in the papers of Violet Oakley in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Elizabeth was born into an old Philadelphia (PA) family and encouraged to pursue her interest in art by her father, who had been an illustrator-correspondent in the U.S. Civil War. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art from 1889 to 1893 under notables teachers such as Thomas Eakins and Thomas Anshutz. While studying with Howard Pyle at Drexel Institute in 1894, she met Jessie Willcox Smith and Violet Oakley. They became good friends and shared a house they called the Red Rose Inn at Villanova (PA) in 1901.

Green worked in charcoal, and after fixing it with a thin and workable varnish spray applied watercolor in glazes. The face of this little girl, which I have lightened in Adobe Photoshop, suffered from the poor quality of four-color process reproduction in the early years. This appeared in Harper's Monthly Magazine for December 1903.

This illustration appeared in Harper's Monthly Magazine a year later in December 1904 and was reproduced in sepia without additional color. The title is "In the Chair of Judgment." There is a credit to the engraver, A. Hayman, which leads me to speculate that Green may have insisted that a specialist be entrusted with reproducing her work after the prior muddy results.

This appeared in Harper's Monthly Magazine as part of a spread in one of their 1905 issues and it seems to be a much cleaner reproduction.

These are still muddy and we can only imagine Green's frustration. One of the series is not shown because it has been printed so much out-of-register. The spread appeared in Harper's Monthly Magazine for August 1905.

Below, the title page of a spread in Harper's Monthly Magazine for December 1905 was no improvement in quality of print production. I've taken the liberty of lightening up the scan in Adobe Photoshop.

Next: More Elizabeth Shippen Green.

Maxfield Parrish: An Appreciation

Maxfield Parrish had studied at Haverford College and the Philadelphia College of Art prior to his invitation by Howard Pyle to study with him. Parrish arrived already a competent illustrator with a substantial body of work and accomplishment. Among members of this freshman class were the very gifted Violet Oakley, Jessie Wilcox Smith and Elizabeth Shippen Green. Henry C. Pitz, in his excellent book, The Brandywine Tradition isn’t clear about the dates involved but I would venture to guess the time as to be somewhere in the years from 1896 to 1899. See Howard Pyle: An Appreciation. Click on images to enlarge.

“Through the night she calls to men, luring them down to their death,” is the illustration for Phoebus on Halzaphron which appeared in Scribner’s Monthly Magazine for August 1901. The influence of Howard Pyle is obvious in the gesture, sky, sea, and voluminous folds of her flowing garment.

Illustration from “Keats’s Poem to Autumn” which appeared in The Century Magazine for November 1904.

This is pure Maxfield Parrish. No one else painted like this. It was almost like using a sketch for a mural to illustrate a magazine piece.
I think Rockwell Kent owed much of the drama in his work to Parrish’s posturing characters. I very much admire both of these men for their genius in thoroughly commanding the media with which they worked, but the grand gestures and poses seem to annoy as much as the rest of the illustration pleases.

The tile for this illustration is “ I am sick of being a princess,” and it appeared in The Century Magazine for December 1904. It is typical Parrish as illustrator of Edith Wharton’s Italian Gardens with two very stiff humans pasted on to a landscape sketch.

This is entitled “Sandman” and appeared in The Century Magazine for October 1905. It’s probably from the other side of Parrish’s brain, the one dedicated to the illustration of children’s books. Pyle and any number of his students, N.C. Wyeth comes to mind immediately, could have done equally as well if not better.

By August of 1907 Parrish had created another of his trademark subjects, the not-quite androgynous nude, seen here amidst leaves and brush about to be devoured by gnats and mosquitoes in front of a full harvest moon and Grecian temple. From Scribner’s Monthly Magazine for August 1907, illustrating lines from Wordsworth: “. . . than Naiad by the side / Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere /
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.”

The jewels amidst these assignments are, in my opinion, two paintings Parrish did to illustrate “The Waters of Venice” by Arthur Symons, as the lead article in Scribner’s Monthly Magazine for April 1906. This man could see, and he could paint, as well as anyone of his contemporaries. It’s no mystery that he did the things he did, the heavy-handed schmalz and pretty pictures. By this time our popular press was taken over by images of saccharine sweetness and dream landscapes.

Next: Elizabeth Shippen Green

More Maxfield Parrish

These first four illustrations are from a special section devoted to Parrish's work entitled "The Great Southwest" published in Century Magazine for November of 1902. There were seven in all, but I think these are the best to consider. Click on images to enlarge.

This is called View in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado commonly known today as simply The Grand Canyon. I'm guessing that it was drawn from a large format black-and-white photograph such as an 8 x 10, and then painted either on site or from color notations and sketches made on site. I know from my visits to the bookshop at the Grand Canyon that there were a couple of brothers who seemed to be resident photographers and I'm guessing that their work was available to Parrish.

Speaking of working from photos, these two riders and their horses look as if they were snapshots and part of a montage. There's precious little painting going on, it would seem, and that that little white – and possibly gloved – hand poking just above the horizon and silhouetted against the blue sky seems totally out of place. Where were the editors on that one?

This looks like the skies we used to see up in Sonoma County, California. It's entitled, "Water let in on a field of Alfalfa."

I don't understand how this got into the mix, what with the gratuitous legend. It's a meticulous rendering and could stand alone with just a line or two in type below the image. Bill Sachs reminds me a lot of Ansel Adams.

I don't have a title for this one, which appeared in the November 1904 issue of Century Magazine. It's a lovely piece and looks so much like the Southwest must have been before the railroad and commercial developers fouled the nest.

This is typical of Parrish's storybook style. It's from "The Desert," which appeared in the December 1902 issue of Scribner's Monthly Magazine.