Your Portrait Drawn by C D Gibson For a Dollar!

The Good Old Days, When a Buck Could Buy...

a Portrait of Yourself by a Legendary Illustrator

by Rick Marschall

"War... What's It Good For?" is a song from the Vietnam era, and its answer is in small part, and somewhat cynically, "Charity Events." Here is a ticket from a 1943 event at the Grand Central Galleries in New York (Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, in the Hotel Gotham). The War was raging around the world, and a charity event was scheduled for the American Red Cross... whose cause is always worthwhile, through wars and rumors of wars.

The Galleries mounted an exhibition featuring the work of more than two dozen noted artists, illustrators, and sculptors. What a day that must have been! The exhibition... the chance to meet the artists... and the chance to have your portrait executed by one of the artists -- for the admission price: One dollar.

There were beginners, to be sure, but legends were there too: Howard Chandler Christy; Jo Davidson; and Charles Dana Gibson. This was a year before the death of the creator of the Gibson Girl, but he was still drawing and painting in semi-retirement at his home in Maine. For years his home was in Manhattan -- figuratively and literally. He chronicled the doings of High Society in the Victorian and Edwardian eras; and he lived on the top floor of the Life Building off Madison Square. He had purchased the magazine that made him famous after its founders died. (In recent years it was the Madison Square Hotel and was my pied a terre in New York City. The owner Abe Puchal furnished it in tribute to the legendary cartoon magazine, with framed Life covers and Gibson art in every room and stairwell.) 

Where are the portraits and sketches done that day, one wonders...

In the meantime, I've got Gibson on my mind. He is one of my favorite cartoonists, and I have so many of his books, illustrated novels, magazine covers and postcards, and ephemera as to have compiled a virtual catalogue raisonné of Gibson. Our dining room has been named The Gibson Room, with framed originals and signed prints on all walls.

At the moment I am happiest with my most recent acquisition -- a large drawing he did in Munich on a tour of the continent, Under the Lindens. Two Gibson Girls, an arresting genre scene, great personalities of his subjects. 

  

              

Gibson twice travelled to Europe to study painting, but could not forsake the pen-and-ink that established his fame. This original has touches of watercolor shading, indicating the time in his career when he experimented.

Here is an old photograph of Gibson and his wife, the former Irene Langhorne -- a Virginia belle whose sister was Lady Nancy Astor (the first woman to sit in the British Parliament) and among whose charity work was founding Big Sisters.

Charles Dana and Irene Langhorne Gibson

The Life Of a Legendary Cartoonist

 

The Great Gluyas Williams

On the Happy and Not So Happy

Job of Cartooning

by Rick Marschall

One of cartooning's natural talents, an "artist's artist," the gentle genius Gluyas Williams was asked for an autograph in 1932. He responded to the aspiring cartoonist (named Tom Sanders) with more -- a hand-written letter. 

Mr Williams at the time was a nationally admired cartoonist who recently had switched his prodigious work from Life magazine to The New Yorker; also drew for other publications; produced a daily newspaper panel for John Wheeler's Bell Syndicate (many featuring the urbane character Fred Perley); was illustrating many books, most notably the collections of Harvard classmate Robert Benchley; drew advertising art... and much more. An unending fount of brilliant humor, flawlessly executed, and (as the owner of many Gluyas Williams originals, I can attest) drawn almost always perfectly -- that is, almost never a correction or cross-out. Amazing.

There was joy in his work -- or at least satisfaction. He never showed malice, though he focused (and titled) his series "life's little foibles." His was a happy world, inhabited by petite bourgeoise folks, going about everyday tasks with which his comfy middle-class readers identified. He never aimed for slapstick nor guffaws; rather comic irony and chuckles.

In fact, Gluyas Williams told me (for I became a friend at the end of his life) that very early in The New Yorker's days he actually scolded the magazine's founder Harold Ross who wanted one of his submissions to show more physical humor. Mr Williams returned the artwork unchanged and explained that the best humor was understated. Ross agreed, and this exchange possibly changed the trademark tone of New Yorker humor forevermore. Gluyas Williams was a modest man, and I cannot believe this story was an empty boast. Not even a full boast, just a memory of an exchange.

Quietly (the typical mode) Mr Williams slipped into semi-obscurity later in life. Brian Walker of the Museum of Cartoon Art edited the National Cartoonists Society album in the 1970s, compiling biographies of living and dead cartoonists, and listed Gluyas Williams as "deceased." In a Nietzschean sense, to some I suppose he was. 

On a visit with Gluyas Williams exactly 50 years ago, I took his photograph. (He was then living in a nursing home, not for any disability of his, but to be with his wife who was infirm.) I interviewed him -- versions have appeared in Cartoonist PROfiles, The Comics Journal, and nemo magazine. I asked him to counter-sign a book he had illustrated exactly 50 years before that -- an "association-piece" that was an inscription by the author, the brilliant Robert Benchley to his fellow Life staffer, Robert E Sherwood, later an award-winning playwright and assistant to Franklin Roosevelt.       

Reverting To Mr Williams' fan letter of 1932. "I am very glad to send you my autograph, and I hope that you will realize your ambition of becoming a cartoonist. It's lots of fun (at times) to be one, but there are lots of days when I'd rather be a brick-layer." An urbane reflection of frustration -- perhaps short-lived in Williams World -- not a primal scream but a primal sigh, just as might have been quietly vented by Fred Perley.

It should be noted here that there is no record of a Tom Sanders, whether a young lad or middle-aged aspirant in 1932, afterward being a professional cartoonist. We will check the documents of the brick-laying profession...

  

INSIDE LOOK -- THE BULLPEN OF EARLY HEARST CARTOONISTS - III: George McManus

"Let George Do It!"

And McManus Did, 

Many Times Over

We have visited, via rare archival material from King Features Syndicate archives, legendary cartoonists from the protean days of comic strips. George Herriman, Tom McNamara, and editor Rudolph Block thus far. Photographs, specialty drawings, data; the only deficiency -- out of our control, as it was "out of control" in 1917 -- is the insipid poetry that serves as promotion. But, that is why the book was produced, so we must endure. (And there are some valuable facts that leak through...)

It is interesting, and a well-known aspect of the Birth of the Comics, that commercialism played a major role. Comics were weapons in circulation wars between publishers. They received boosts -- creative freedom, vast publicity, and cartoonists treated like stars -- to assist in their acceptance by the public.

The "wars" also featured cartoonists themselves as weapons, objectives, prizes, and goals. many of the great early artists of the Funny Pages switched employers and venues, sometimes dissatisfied with their employers (we have documented that Block seriously annoyed numerous of his cartoonists to the point of their quitting Hearst)... but usually having their services bid and outbid by hungry publishers.

There is a story -- if not true it virtually encapsulates the truth of the times -- that T E Powers spent an afternoon in a Park Row bar, not working for Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World nor William Randolph Hearst of the Journal, but receiving reports from office boys how his salary was going up and up as the two publishers bid against each other for his services. (Hearst won out.)

Frederick Burr Opper drew for the New York Herald (and Puck Magazine) until purloined by Hearst. Rudolph Dirks was hired away from Hearst by Pulitzer; so was Bud Fisher with the assistance of syndicate pioneer John Wheeler. Winsor McCay drew for James Gordon Bennett's two newspapers before Hearst hired him away. George Herriman drew for the World but eventually settled in the Hearst stable. R F Outcault, whose Yellow Kid can be cited for inaugurating this crazy transmigration, worked for Pulitzer, then Hearst, then Pulitzer again, then the Herald, then Hearst until his retirement.

In the eyes of the voracious publishers (benign godfathers they were, when all is said and done; or wet-nurses) there was no bigger star in their constellations than George McManus. He had attracted the attention of Pulitzer in their original working environs of St Louis; then McManus drew for Pulitzer's New York World.

McManus the cartoonist had a short gestation as a struggling stylist; soon his artwork was polished, handsome, mannered... and funny. As a creator, he created multiple strips starring in multiple titles. His premises were funny, and his narratives flowed like stage-plays. In fact his several creations did become Broadway musicals. And his characters appeared on the market as toys and in games.

Probably the most popular of his strips was The Newlyweds, a one-premise strip (as most early comics were) about an obstreperous baby. When McManus switched to Hearst he continued the strip but renamed it Their Only Child!, finessing a sticking-point of other mutinies like Mutt and Jeff and The Katzenjammer Kids whose titles became bones of contention.

McManus created another strip for Hearst, a Sunday page called The Whole Bloomin' Family. It is curious to note that Bringing Up Father, which commenced full-term as a Hearst feature in 1913, never was a Sunday page until six years later. After that it became the major strip among Hearst and King Features' properties for years. It owned the front pages of the Hearst chain's Sunday comic sections until supplanted by Blondie in the early 1950s.

In the 1917 promotion book, McManus was allowed to illustrate the stars in his galaxy including characters he had created, and left, at Pulitzer's shop. We see the eponymous star of Let George Do It; Rosie and her Beau; and Panhandle Pete. In addition, Snookums Newlywed and his parents; the Whole Bloomin' Family; and Jiggs and Maggie of Bringing Up Father. 

 

By the way, and speaking of the Newlyweds and their only child (italics aside), we have a reprint book of daily strips from the New York World. It is from 1907. The strips appeared earlier in the year in the newspaper, not to mention the book collection -- which challenges the convention histories citing Mr A Mutt as the medium first daily strip (November 1907). More to follow in Yesterday's Papers and in the revival of nemo magazine...