100 Years of Illustration

Ernest Thompson Seton - 3

Meet Tito the Coyote published as the lead piece in the August 1900 edition of Scribner's Monthly Magazine.

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Close-up of Tito. I will wager that Walt Disney (1901-1966) as a boy read these stories by Seton. With all due respect to Walt, this drawing of Tito is more realistic and believable and even more charming than Disney's fantasy illustration of animals.

Tito and her coyote companion whom the cowboys called Saddleback because of the dark patch on his shoulders.

Tito and Saddlebag's nightly duet. These sounds are all too familiar here now that coyotes have invaded New England. It is no longer safe to let a pet cat or small dog out of the house unattended. And even then, they have been known to pounce on a dog being walked by its owner.

A coyote about to pounce on a prairie dog trying to chew into a rolling apple.

A male and female Woodland Caribou as drawn by Ernest Thompson Seton from the April 1906 edition of Scribner's Monthly Magazine.

Seton's sketches of Norway Reindeer originally printed in black ink.

Ernest Thompson Seton - 2

I hope I'm not boring you with this man's work. He's dated of course but in his day he was the popular naturalist of his time. If you take the time to look at what he did and read what he wrote, you wonder how did he get it all done in one lifetime. He was prodigious. Remember that for every piece of his that was in print there must have been twice as much material that was never published!

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Twenty years ago when we lived in bountiful Sonoma County, California, I was up on an ordinary six-foot aluminum step ladder picking persimmons to ship to friends back East, when all of a sudden I was flung backwards onto our asphalt driveway as one leg of the ladder sunk into the ground and propelled me into the air. The ladder leg had broken into one of the many underground gopher tunnels that were part and parcel of the local landscape.

Sure enough, Ernest Thompson Seton had published an article about these critters in the June 1904 issue of The Century Magazine entitled The Master Plowman of the West. Had I read that piece I would not have entrusted my personal safety to a home-handymans' ladder instead of a traditional sturdy arbor ladder. We had under our land, I believe, a colony of gophers and their homes the size of Petaluma.

Here he draws and writes about crows, complete with his own musical score of crow calls.

It's from Silverspot, the Story of a Crow, that appeared in the February 1898 issue of Scribner's Monthly Magazine.

The Century Magazine published Seton's Fable & Woodmyth as a continuing feature. This appeared as one of four in the December 1903 issue.

Here are more from November 1903 issue. They are remarkable for the obvious influence that the discovery and popularity of Japanese woodcuts had on the arts and crafts of the time.

Ernest Thompson Seton's The American Bison or Buffalo

Ernest Thompson Seton was a force to be reckoned with as author and illustrator of scores of books about nature and Indian lore. He was a Scot born Ernest Evan Thompson in England on 14 August 1860, who with his parents emigrated to Canada at the age of six. To avoid an abusive father he took to the woods as an escape, where he became fascinated by nature and drawing animal life. His work was good enough for him to win a scholarship at the Royal Academy in London.

Later, he changed his last name to Seton and began a career as an artist, writer and naturalist, eventually moving to New York City where he became successful enough to build a home in Cos Cob, Connecticut, a suburb of Greenwich.

He was also famous as a mover and shaper in the U.S.A. of the Boy Scout movement, founded by Lord Baden-Powell, who took Scouting world wide.

You can read more about this as well as biographical information at the following links:

Wikipedia,

here,

and here.

These are scans from his lead article in the October 1906 issue of Scribner's Magazine, The American Bison or Buffalo.

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A Buffalo Herd in Early Fall.

Detail of the illustration above.

One of the studies Seton made while drawing buffalos.

A large bull buffalo.

A Catalo, or hybrid cow.

A Catalo yearling.

A very high-humped old bull buffalo.

Seton titled this, The old bull's last fight.