Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Herman Stoddard Vice (1884-1956)

Painter and illustrator Herman Stoddard Vice was born the son of a minister on June 21, 1884, in Jefferson, Indiana, a small town west of Frankfurt. He attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and was an artist closely associated with Chicago. In September 1918, when he filled out his draft card, Vice was working for Jahn & Ollier Engraving Company in Chicago. (He also complained of having "crippled hands due to rheumatism.") Vice was a member of the Illinois Academy of Fine Arts, the South Side Art Association, and the Romany Club, as well as the Palette and Chisel Club and the Hoosier Salon in Chicago.

On November 26, 1908, Vice married Annette Zelna Border (née Menser) in Welland, Ontario. Both gave their residences as Buffalo, New York. (I detect an elopement.) The couple lived in Chicago during the censuses of 1910, 1920, and 1930. In 1910, Vice gave his place of employment as a pyrography company, in other words, a firm engaged in wood-burning for graphic or decorative purposes. By 1940, the Vices were in Lebanon, Indiana, where Herman was employed as an "experimental man" in a manufacturing firm, presumably the U.S. Machine Corporation in Lebanon. Vice's situation had not changed by 1942, when he filled out his second draft card. Then a manufacturer of stokers for home furnaces and burners, the U.S. Machine Corporation is now part of Stewart Warner, a maker of gauges and other car parts.

In 1948, Herman Stoddard Vice and his wife were in Marion, Indiana, and that's where he died, on November 29, 1956. Vice was buried far from home at Grandview Cemetery in Southmont, Pennsylvania, in a plot with his wife's parents. Annette Z. Vice followed her husband to the grave in 1967.

Women by the Sea, a painting by Indiana illustrator Herman Stoddard Vice.
Midwestern Landscape by Herman Stoddard Vice.

Further works by Herman Stoddard Vice:

A lake scape, circa 1921.

Drifting Clouds, 1933.

The Sentinel.

Mount Hood.

Revised and updated on December 6, 2019, and on October 17, 2021.
Text copyright 2011, 2019, 2021 Terence E. Hanley

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Frederick William Boulton (1904-1969)

Frederick William Boulton was born on March 18, 1904, in Mishawaka, Indiana, son of a Lutheran minister. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Academy of Art, and the Académie Julian in Paris. His teachers included John Norton, Charles H. Woodbury, and Joseph Allworthy. Boulton also taught at the American Academy and exhibited regularly in the Chicago area, where he lived and worked for most of his life. An illustrator, commercial artist, and fine artist, Frederick Boulton worked in a variety of media and genres. He was also a craftsman, but his self-described main interests were hunting, fishing, and painting. Boulton started with the J. Walter Thompson Company, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world, in 1923. Founder of the Art Directors' Club of Chicago, Boulton was named art director of the year by the National Society of Art Directors in 1955. He retired in 1965 and died four short years later, in 1969.

Waiting for the 8:18 by Frederick William Boulton.
And a watercolor with an unknown title by the same artist.

Text copyright 2011 Terence E. Hanley

Monday, August 15, 2011

Thomas R. Funderburk (1928-1999)

Thomas Ray Funderburk was born on November 8, 1928, in Hammond, Indiana. He served in the Marine Corps from 1946 to 1948 and graduated from Indiana University in 1952. Funderburk was assistant art director for Bantam Books from 1961 to 1966, when he went off on his own as a freelance artist, writer, and designer. He wrote two well-regarded books on airplanes, The Fighters: The Men and Machines of the First Air War (1965) and The Early Birds of War: The Daring Pilots and Fighter Aeroplanes of World War I (1968). Funderburk also illustrated several books, including Stormy Voyager: The Story of Charles Wilkes by Robert Silverberg (1968), The Nature of Animals by Lorus and Margery Milne (1969), and Whales: A First Book by Helen Hoke and Valerie Pitt (1981). Funderburk died on December 30, 1999, at age seventy-one.

Thomas Funderburk (left) from his days at Indiana University, from The Arbutus.
The Nature of Animals by Lorus and Margery Milne (1969), illustrated by Thomas R. Funderburk.
Funderburk's own Early Birds of War from 1968.

Updated December 6, 2019.
Text and captions copyright 2011, 2019 Terence E. Hanley