100 Years of Illustration

Charlotte Harding's "Athletics for College Girls," 1903

Click on images to enlarge them. 

Do you see a little bit of Edvard Munch's The Scream (see below) in this? Munch painted it in 1893, just ten years before it was published in Alice Katharine Fallows' piece in The Century Magazine for May 1903 entitled Athletics for College Girls.

The Scream by Edvard Munch, Norwegian Expressionist, 1863-1944.

The first page of the piece.

Closeup of the illustration. The reproduction is horrible but it could be the degree of difficulty at the time of scanning a charcoal illustration overlaid with watercolor washes.

More detail.

This one is called Basket-Ball, Bryn Mawr. I have no idea how that game was being played.

Float-Day, Wellesley. Harding did a great job conveying the mood and dusky evening atmosphere.

Field-Day, Vassar. Lots of great action here but the faces of the athletes are too similar compared to the variety of faces in the crowd.

A Hockey-Game. It's what was later called Field Hockey, and it's the entire illustration from which the detail at the top of this piece came. Great action as well, and a similarity of faces and expressions. Where was the art director and the editor?

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These are illustrations from a piece entitled Valjean that appeared in The Century Magazine for April of 1903.

Detail of the illustration. Great drawing but those bland faces?

"The child revived when restoratives were given." Same comment here. Wonderful child -- Harding did a good job with children -- and a good dog, but Mom and Nanny are uninspired, in my opinion.

Charlotte Harding's "Our Foolish Virgins," 1901

Charlotte Harding was a very talented Philadelphia young woman who lived from 1873 to 1951.

This is what Henry C. Pitz had to say about her in his excellent book, The Brandywine Tradition, published by Houghton Mifflin of Boston in 1969:

Charlotte Harding was the fourth of the young Philadelphia women to come from the early [Howard Pyle] Drexel classes. She, too, had the decorative bent and indulged it with more freedom and daring than most. She searched out many an unhackneyed rythym in her pictures -- strange shapes and patterns delighted her and she worked out new ways of seeing the humdrum world. Unforttunately, her strong sense of originality was handicapped by poor health.

The following illustrations are scanned from The Century Magazine of November 1901's lead article entitled Our Foolish Virgins, by Eliot Gregory.

Click on the images to enlarge them.

Title page of the piece.

Caption: "A woman must have some serious object in life."

Caption: "The Matinée Girl," was full page.

"Had no intention of wasting her life in the country."

 

" 'It's a perfect shame.' "

 

"The price of those theater tickets."

Full page layout "While Mama Cooks the Dinner." The hand-lettering seems out of character here and I suppose it has to do with daughter practicing her piano lessons while Mom gets dinner ready.

 

 

The cat obviously knows when good things are happening in the kitchen. 

 

"A 'quick change' . . . for the rest of the afternoon."

"The hard-working bridgeites."

"Sporty gents in loud clothes followed the morning play."

Frederic R. Gruger's early work

Frederic Roderigo Gruger was a very proficient illustrator who, with the exception of a book written by Bennard B. Perlman has received less notice than his skills warrant. The work shown here is what I would call an early 20th Century newspaper style of pen-and-ink drawing, probably with what was called a crow quill (croquille en français) pen on heavy weight smooth drawing paper, often referred to as "cartridge paper."

The illustrations are from a story by Edward W. Townsend in the February 1905 issue of the Century Magazine. Townsend was a veteran Democratic politician from New Jersey who placed the story on the exotic make-believe island of Ka as it was visited by ships of the U.S. Navy to show the flag by way of installing a young American diplomat.

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Click on the image for a better view of the ships.

Detail of an imaginary Ka functionary

The caption for this illustrations reads " 'This is your la-al,' [referring to the wreath she holds] replied the one who had addressed him."

Detail of the hero and a young woman of Ka

Young maidens of Ka

" 'It's like this, Keegan,' Jack explained" [Jack was apparently a New Yorker on board the U.S.S. Cleveland, an American cruiser anchored at Ka.

" 'One must accept care with career,' she coyly replied." Keegan converses with Princess Pali-ulee.

"The language thrilled Monroe, who had written the speech from points by Keegan." Monroe is the U.S. minister, Keegan the young hero of Townsend's yarn.

Frederic Gruger was born in Philadelphia in 1871. He mostly worked for the Saturday Evening Post. but left the Post in 1940 to be one of the illustrators of novels, that King Features adapted for newspapers in cooperation with the Book-of-the-Month Club in those days. He retired from illustration and began teaching at the Pratt Institute in 1946.

The first link to author Ellis Parker Butler has many links to Gruber's illustrations of his stories.

Walt Reed's The Illustrator in America 1900-1960's has this to say of F.R. Gruger --

Frederic Roderigo Gruger (1871-1953) wrote on the subject of illustration for the Encyclopedia Brittanica --

"... Illustration may become a great art, but to become a great art, it must be creative. It cannot compete with the camera in the reporting of facts. It has no business with the outer shell of things at all. It deals with the spirit....The nature of the story portrayed is the measure of the artist who portrays it...."

....He worked in a medium developed out of his earlier work for the Philadelphia Ledger. The drawing was made with Wolff pencil, rubbed with a stump or eraser, oftentimes over an underlying wash, which produced a full range of values, particularly a rich, velvety black. The board itself was an inexpensive cardboard used by newspapers for mounting silver prints. It had a receptive, soft surface and has since become known as "Gruger board."

Gruger got his start with the old Century magazine [as shown above] and worked subsequently for many other publishers and advertisers, but was most closely identified with The Saturday Evening Post.

Italics are mine -- P.G.

Jules Guerin at the St. Louis Fair, 1904

While we can show only four of Guérin's illustrations in color here, from the lead article in Scribner's Monthly Magazine for April 1904 by Montgomery Schuyler, this exhibition was formally known as
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition. You can read about the fair at the Wikipedia link, or search for other sources of information.

I have read and reread the learned text of the distinguished architectural critic and once again I have to say that it would do a great disservice to the genius of Jules Guérin to bore you with the comparisons made between this fair and others of the time, with not a word about the splendid illustrations. More's the pity.

Click on the images to enlarge them.

The Colonnade of the Varied Industries Building

Education Building, reflected in the Grand Basin, early evening

Electricity Building by Moonlight

Façade of Transportation Building at night.

I'll close this tribute to the work of Jules Guérin without adding anything further. You have now seen enough of his renderings to appreciate his genius. I can only marvel at his courage to undertake such monumental assignments, and then to bring them off as spectacularly as he did.