Jessie Willcox Smith | |
|---|---|
 Smithc. 1900 | |
| Born | (1863-09-06)September 6, 1863 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | May 3, 1935(1935-05-03) (aged 71) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Known for | Illustrations |
| Movement | The Golden Age of Illustration |
| Awards |
|
| Elected | Society of Illustrators' Hall of Fame, 1992 |
| Years active | 1880–1935 |
Jessie Willcox Smith (September 6, 1863 – May 3, 1935) was an American illustrator during theGolden Age of American illustration.[2] She was considered "one of the greatest pure illustrators".[3] A contributor to books and magazines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Smith illustrated stories and articles for clients such asCentury,Collier's,Leslie's Weekly,Harper's,McClure's,Scribners, and theLadies' Home Journal. She had an ongoing relationship withGood Housekeeping, which included a long-runningMother Goose series of illustrations and also the creation of all theGood Housekeeping covers from December 1917 to 1933. Smith illustrated over sixty books, including notable works likeLouisa May Alcott'sLittle Women andAn Old-Fashioned Girl,Henry Wadsworth Longfellow'sEvangeline, andRobert Louis Stevenson'sA Child's Garden of Verses.
Jessie Willcox Smith was born on September 6, 1863, in theMount Airy neighborhood ofPhiladelphia,Pennsylvania. She was the youngest daughter of Charles Henry Smith, an investment broker, and Katherine DeWitt Willcox Smith.[4][5] Jessie attended private elementary schools. At sixteen, she was sent toCincinnati,Ohio, to live with her cousins and finish her education. She trained to be a teacher and taught kindergarten in 1883. However, Smith found that the physical demands of working with children were too strenuous for her.[6][7] She struggled to bend down to their level because of her back problems.[5] Smith discovered her talent for drawing after being persuaded to attend an art lesson taught by her cousin.[7]
In 1884, Smith attended thePhiladelphia School of Design for Women (nowMoore College of Art and Design) and in 1885 attended thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia underThomas Eakins' and Thomas Anshutz' supervision. It was under Eakins that Smith began to usephotography as a resource in her illustrations.[7] Although Eakins' demeanor could be difficult, particularly with female students, he became one of her first major influences.[8] Smith's illustrationThree Little Maidens All in a Row was published in theSt. Nicholas Magazine in May 1888, while she was still a student at the Pennsylvania Academy.[9] Illustration was one artistic avenue through which women could earn a living at the time.[5] Creating illustrations for children's books or of family life was considered an appropriate career for woman artists because it drew upon maternal instincts. Alternatively, fine art that includedlife drawing was not deemed "ladylike".[10] Illustration partly became viable as a result of improved color printing processes and a resurgence of book design in England.[11]
Smith graduated from PAFA in June 1888.[9] The same year, she was hired for an entry-level position in the advertising department of theLadies' Home Journal. Smith's responsibilities included finishing rough sketches, designing borders, and preparing advertising art for the magazine.[9][12] In this role, she illustrated Mary Wiley Staver's 1892 poetry collectionNew and True.[9]
In 1894, while working atLadies' Home Journal, Smith enrolled in classes taught byHoward Pyle at Drexel Institute, nowDrexel University.[5][13] She was in his first class, which was almost 50% female.[12] Pyle pushed many artists from Smith's generation to fight for the right to illustrate for major publishing houses. He worked closely with many artists he believed to be "gifted". Smith later wrote a speech stating that working with Pyle swept away "all the cobwebs and confusions that so beset the path of the art-student."[14] The speech was later compiled in the 1923 work "Report of the Private View of Exhibition of the Works of Howard Pyle at the Art Alliance".[failed verification] She studied with Pyle until 1897.[15]
While studying at Drexel, Smith metElizabeth Shippen Green andViolet Oakley, both of whom had similar talents and mutual interests. They formed a lifelong friendship, sharing a studio on Philadelphia's Chestnut Street and working together.[5] Oakley and Smith illustratedHenry Wadsworth Longfellow'sEvangeline, published in 1897. Their teacher, Howard Pyle, helped to secure this first commission for the two artists.[5]
At the turn of the twentieth century, Smith's career flourished. She illustrated a number of books and magazines and created an advertisement for Ivory soap. Her works were published inScribner's,Harper's Bazaar,Harper's Weekly, andSt. Nicholas Magazine. She won an award forChild Washing.[16] Green, Smith, and Oakley became known as "The Red Rose Girls" after the Red Rose Inn inVillanova, Pennsylvania, where they lived and worked together for four years beginning in the early 1900s.[17][12] They leased the inn, where they were joined by Oakley's mother, Green's parents, and Henrietta Cozens, who managed the gardens and inn.[5] Alice Carter wrote about the women inThe Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love for an exhibition of their work at theNorman Rockwell Museum. Museum Director Laurie Norton Moffatt said, "These women were considered the most influential artists of American domestic life at the turn of the twentieth century. Celebrated in their day, their poetic, idealized images still prevail as archetypes of motherhood and childhood a century later."[10]
Green and Smith illustrated the calendar,The Child, in 1903.[5] Smith exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts that year and won theMary Smith Prize.[5][18] When the artists lost the lease on the Red Rose Inn in 1905,[19] a farmhouse was remodeled byFrank Miles Day for them inWest Mount Airy, Philadelphia. They named their new shared home and workplace "Cogslea", drawn from the initials of their surnames and that of Smith's roommate, Henrietta Cozens.[20]
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As educational opportunity opened up to women in the later 19th century, women artists joined professional enterprises, and also founded their own art associations. But artwork by 'lady artists' was considered inferior. To help overcome that stereotype, women became "increasingly vocal and confident" in promoting their work as part of the emerging image of the educated, modern and freer "New Woman".[21] Artists "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplifying this emerging type through their own lives."[22]
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, about 88% of the subscribers to the 11,000 American magazines and periodicals were women. As more women entered the artistic community, publishers hired women to create illustrations that depicted the world through women's perspectives. Other successful illustrators wereJennie Augusta Brownscombe,Rose O'Neill, Elizabeth Shippen Green, andViolet Oakley.[23]
Opposed to submitting work for advertisements, Smith preferred to illustrate covers and stories,[24] which bore her signature.[25] Smith was particularly known for her illustrations and advertising posters[26][27] featuring children and women,[28] which appealed to millions of people.
According to theNational Museum of American Illustration, Smith is regarded by many as the "greatest children's book illustrator". Her endearing portrayals of children have drawn comparisons toMary Cassatt's work.[12]
Smith was a member of Philadelphia'sThe Plastic Club (founded in 1897), which was established to promote "Art for art's sake" and to provide a means for artists to encourage one another professionally and create opportunities to sell their works.[29][30]Other members includedElenore Abbott, Violet Oakley, and Elizabeth Shippen Green.[29][31] All of the women who founded it were students of Howard Pyle.
In 1903, theSociety of Illustrators electedFlorence Scovel Shinn andElizabeth Shippen Green as its first women members. Smith, Oakley, andMay Wilson Preston became members the following year.[32] They were associate members until 1920, when they were made full members of the organization.[31]
In 1905 she was one of seven leading artists who contracted to work exclusively forCollier's.[33] The others wereCharles Dana Gibson,Maxfield Parrish,A. B. Frost,Frank Xavier Leyendecker,E. W. Kemble, andFrederic Remington.[34]
According toThe New York Times in 1910, Smith made about US$12,000 ($404,957 today) per year[35] and, likeNorman Rockwell andJ. C. Leyendecker, became popular as a "media star".[36]
In 1911 both her parents and her former teacher and promoter, Howard Pyle, died and Elizabeth Shippen Green married Huger Elliott.[5][37][a] Oakley had a major mural project in the Pennsylvania state capitol in Harrisburg that kept her away from Cogslea for extended periods.[39] Smith had a 16-room house and studio that she called Cogshill built on property near Cogslea. She lived in this house, her final home, with Cozens, her aunt, and her brother.[40][b]
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Over the next several years, she continued to create illustrations for magazines, including a series ofMother Goose illustrations printed inGood Housekeeping, which were black and white until mid-1914 when they were printed in color. Her illustrations were reproduced in the bookThe Jessie Willcox Smith Mother Goose by Dodd, Mead, and Company. This book, reflecting her continued theme of mother and child in a realistic portrayal, was a commercial success. Biographer Edward D. Nudelman wrote, "The cover illustration for this book, showing two children nestled beneath the wings of Mother Goose, is one of Smith's most pleasing and warm images. The serenity portrayed in the posture and expression of the children, along with the material concern of Mother Goose, gives evidence of the genius of Smith."[42]
Smith had a knack for painting children, persuasively using milk, cookies and fairy tales to achieve a relaxed, focused child model. In an October 1917Good Housekeeping article, she wrote that "a child will always look directly at anyone who is telling a story; so while I paint I tell tales marvelous to hear."[43] In 1915 Smith finished one of her most well-known work, a series of pictures for Charles Kingsley'sThe Water-Babies.[40][41]
She graced every printed cover ofGood Housekeeping from December 1917 through April 1933, creating 184 illustrations of family scenes for the magazine. She is the artist with the longest continuous run of illustrated magazine covers. The magazine said of her, "Certainly no other artist is so fitted to understand us, and to make for us pictures so truly an index to what we are as a magazine are striving for. The holding up to our readers of the highest ideals of the American home, the home with that certain sweet wholesomeness one associates with a sunny living-room—and children."[44]
She was one of the highest paid illustrators of the time, earning between $1,500 and $1,800 per cover.[40][41] Smith also created illustrations forKodak andProcter & Gamble's Ivory soap over the course of her career.[12][45] She made illustrations forCollier's magazines[46] and ofCharles Dickens' works, likeTiny Tim,Dickens' Children – Ten Children, andDavid Copperfield.[47]
Smith continued to create illustrations throughout her life, but she began painting more portraits around 1925.[48] In later years, she used a technique that she learned from Eakins, using photographs as a tool when creating portraits.[49]
Smith's style changed drastically throughout her life. At the beginning of her career, she used dark-lined borders to delineate brightly colored objects and people in a style described as "Japonesque". In later works, she softened the lines and colors until they almost disappeared. Smith worked in mixed media: oil, watercolor, pastels, gouache, charcoal, whatever she felt gave her desired effect. She often overlaid oils on charcoal on a paper whose grain or texture added an important element to the work. Her use of color was influenced by the French impressionist painters.[5][50]
All the models I have ever had for my illustrations are just the adorable children of my kind friends, who would lend them to me for a little while. Such a thing as a paid and trained model is an abomination and a travesty on childhood—a poor little crushed and scared unnatural atom, automatically taking the pose and keeping it in a spiritless, lifeless manner. The professional child model is usually a horribly self-conscious, overdressed child whose fond parents proudly insist that he or she is just what you want, and give a list of the people for whom he or she has posed.
Most of Smith's work is concerned with children and motherly love. Many reviewers say Smith was continually trying to recreate the image of love she had desperately needed as a child. Smith preferred to use non-professional children as opposed to child actors as models because she found professional children did not have the same soul or will to explore as amateur child models. She would invite her friends to visit and watch their children play, to use as her inspiration.[50]
Though never a travel enthusiast, Smith finally agreed to tour Europe in 1933 with Isabel Crowder, who was both Henrietta Cozens' niece and also a nurse.[52] During her trip, her health deteriorated.[5] Smith died in her sleep at her house at Cogshill in 1935 at the age of 71.[50]
In 1936, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts held a memorial retrospective exhibition of her works.[53]
In 1991, Smith became the third woman to be inducted into The Hall of Fame of theSociety of Illustrators.Lorraine Fox (1979) had been the first andNeysa Moran McMein (1984) was the second.[54] Of the small group of women inducted since then, three were the members of The Red Rose Girls: Jessie Willcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green (1994) and Violet Oakley (1996).[10]
Smith bequeathed 14 original works to theLibrary of Congress' "Cabinet of American Illustration" collection to document theGolden Age of Illustration (1880–1920s).[55][56] Smith's papers are on deposit in the collection of theArchives of American Art at theSmithsonian Institution.[57]
The following collections contain her works:
Smith made illustrations for more than 250 periodicals, 200 magazine covers, 60 books, prints, calendars and posters from 1888 to 1932. She also painted portraits. Some of her works are listed below.[66]
The major magazines that she illustrated include:[5]
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