Happy Thanksgiving!

"Thanksgiving Day in Old New England" by Johnny Gruelle from Judge, about one hundred years gone.

Terence E. Hanley, 2014, 2024.

Hoosiers in Art

A cartoon by Art Young (1866-1943) showing types from the World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. In the upper left, lounging on a wooden chair, is what seems to be the simplest among them. According to the caption, he is "A Posey County Type on the Veranda of the Indiana Building."

Posey County is the southwestern-most county in Indiana and home of the New Harmony Utopian community of the early nineteenth century. It's the only county in Indiana that touches both the Wabash River and the Ohio River. I have never been there, but I imagine that the farming is good and that the timber is almost southern in character and composition. (Indiana by the way is the only state in which our two deciduous conifers are both native. Baldcypress, a southern tree, is found in Posey County. Larch, or tamarack, calls the northern part of the state home.)

Unfortunately for Art Young, he was not born a Hoosier. He was instead native to Illinois. Young worked for the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean early in his career and created this cartoon for the paper's color section. New York newspapers get a lot of attention because of their color Sunday comics--Hogan's Alley (The Yellow Kid), Buster Brown, and so on--but the Chicago Inter Ocean was the first American paper to print in color. This cartoon gave me the idea for today's posting. It's only right that it should come first.

A cartoon by a native-born Hoosier who was transplanted out of state, and referring to a cartoon by a non-native who was transplanted to Indiana. The native was Cyrus Cotton Hungerford (ca. 1889-1983), aka Cy Hungerford, a newspaper cartoonist in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and more famously, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hungerford was born in Manilla, Indiana, not far from my home. He left Indiana early on but returned there for eternal rest. This cartoon, from fifty-seven years ago this month, refers to Toonerville Folks, also called Toonerville Trolley, drawn by Fontaine Fox (1884-1964). Fox was born in Louisville, Kentucky, but matriculated at Indiana University. That's where you will find his collection of original cartoons as well.

It's time for the county fair all over America, and children are carefully showing their livestock and poultry like the girl in this painting by Norman Rockwell from 1947-1948. Times have changed and clothing, too, but you might still see people like this at the 4-H fairgrounds this month. (Note the 4-H shamrock on the papers under the girl's arm.) Every one of them is a Hoosier.

In 1947, Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) made a trip to Jay County, Indiana, to take pictures of the Steed family and their neighbors. The artist used those pictures as references for his painting "The County Agent," published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1948. From left to right, the people in the painting are Don Steed of Redkey; Mr. Steed's daughter Jama; Jay County Extension Agent Harold Riby (or Herald K. Rippey--I'm not sure as to the correct spelling); Larry and Sharon Lear or Steed (again, not certain); Mr. Steed's wife Martha; and hired hand Arlie Champ.

James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), a portrait by T.C. Steele (1847-1926). Born in Greenfield, Indiana, Riley was known as the Hoosier Poet and the Hoosier Bard. Steele was the leading artist in the renowned Hoosier Group of the late 1800s and early 1900s. This painting is from 1891. Riley was then in his early forties, and the artist had not many years before returned from studies in Germany. The dark palette and careful brushwork indicate a German influence. Steele's landscapes, for which he known, are much more colorful and impressionistic.

Here is a later portrait of Riley by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). The palette is still dark, but there are rosy tones in the subject's face and hands, and his tie is red. Sargent was trained in France; he is known for his quick, loose, and impressionistic brushwork. Of the two, I believe this to be the more successful portrait. Nonetheless, T.C. Steele was a very fine artist.

Here is the Hoosier Poet on a smaller scale: a U.S. postage stamp from 1940.

I believe this to be a picture of Gene Stratton Porter (1863-1924), author of A Girl of the Limberlost and Freckles, but the source on the Internet does not describe or identify the painting, nor does it give the name of the artist.

"The Underground Railroad" by Cincinnati artist Charles T. Webber (1825-1911). Painted in time to be displayed at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, "The Underground Railroad" shows Levi Coffin (1798-1877) and his wife Catherine White Coffin at their work. The Levi Coffin home in Fountain City, Indiana, is a National Historic Landmark.

"The Canal: Morning Effect" by Richard Buckner Gruelle (1851-1914), a member of the Hoosier Group and father of a family of artists in Johnny, Prudence, and Justin Gruelle. The view (from 1894) is of the Indiana Statehouse, and beyond that, of the Indiana Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Indianapolis. There is in fact a Hoosier in the painting, a woman wearing a red hat. I saw an image of this painting years ago and I have never forgotten it. It came from a self-taught artist. The canal in the picture is just west of Downtown. My grandfather's brother drowned in its waters at the age of four more than one hundred twenty years ago.

A statue of a Doughboy from a cemetery in Monroe County, Indiana. One hundred years ago this summer, the world went to war. America sent hundreds of thousands to men to the Western Front after entering the war in 1917. They proved decisive in victory for the Allies. Hundreds of thousands were also killed, wounded, or died of non-combat injuries or disease. In 1918-1920, the Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people all over the world. When I see a death date of 1919 for a young person in the United States, I can't help but think it was because of the flu. The Riddle brothers, one of whom may be depicted in the statue shown here, may very well have died of the disease that so ravaged the world.

If you go to Monroe County, or Lawrence County, or places close by in Indiana, you will see much that is made of limestone, including the statue of Joe Palooka at Oolitic. Joe Palooka was created by the cartoonist Ham Fisher (1900 or 1901-1955), a Pennsylvanian by birth but also a traveling salesman. He is supposed to have sold Joe Palooka the comic strip first to the Indianapolis Star. Whether that story is true or not, Fisher seems to have had a soft spot in his heart for the Hoosier State. On June 14, 1948, he was on hand to dedicate the Joe Palooka statue at its original location. (It was later moved to Oolitic.) Near Oolitic is the quarry where the limestone used in the Empire State Building was cut.

Johnny Appleseed (1774-1845) came to Indiana late and life. He died there and was buried there, in or near Fort Wayne in 1845.

Edward Eggleston (1837-1902) wrote The Hoosier Schoolmaster, one of the most popular of nineteenth century novels. It was adapted to this children's version in the 1940s. The cover illustration is unsigned. In 1812, my family came over from Kentucky into Jefferson County, Indiana, about where Eggleston's book is set. Maybe those are little Bear children running around the school.

Speaking of little bears, here is a picture of the kidnapping of Frances Slocum (ca. 1773-1847), which took place in Pennsylvania in 1778. Frances, renamed Mo-con-no-quah (translated as Young Bear or Little Bear), was removed to Indiana, grew up in the Delaware Indian tribe, and married a Delaware man. In 1837, she was reunited with her family, but she decided not to return to them. Instead she lived out her life in Indiana, a place named for her people.

Mo-con-no-quah in adulthood. The portrait is signed. It appears to be the same signature as in the image above.

O-Saw-Se-Quah (or O Sha Se Qua), Frances Slocum's daughter, a drawing that is perhaps also by the same artist. (Note the distinctive B in the lower right corner. The date appears to be 1904.) American Indians were the first Hoosiers. I'll close with the image of a woman who was descended from them and from the white settlers who displaced them. 

Captions copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Independence Day!

"The Glorious Fourth at Yapp's Crossing" by John B. Gruelle (1880-1938) of Indianapolis, from Judge magazine, circa 1910.

"Particle of Smoke, Containing Fourth of July Microbe, Highly Magnified" by Harvey Peake (1866-1958) of New Albany, also from Judge, circa 1910.

The cover of We Love America by Josephine van Dolzen Pease (1951) and illustrated by Esther Friend (ca. 1907-1991) of Indianapolis.

A scene from the Revolutionary War in Vermont, drawn by Roy Frederic Heinrich (1881-1943) of Goshen, Indiana, taken from The White Mountain Scrap Book by Ernest E. Bisbee (1946), originally from Heinrich's series for the National Life Insurance Company of Montpelier, Vermont.

An illustration showing the surrender of General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, October 17, 1777, by Frederick Coffay Yohn (1875-1933) of Indianapolis. Burgoyne's surrender took place more than a year after the first Independence Day, but it proved a turning point in the Revolutionary War and helped assure that we would soon be free of tyranny.

May we forever be so free.

Happy Independence Day, America!

Captions copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

A Cartoon for June

A Cartoon for June: "The June Bride--Off for the Honeymoon" by John Gruelle. This is one of Gruelle's cartoons in the "Yapp's Crossing" series from Judge magazine. It was first printed about a hundred years ago. Born in Arcola, Illinois, on December 24, 1880, John Barton Gruelle grew up in Indianapolis in an artistic family. His father was the painter Richard Buckner Gruelle (1851-1914). Gruelle's younger siblings were artist and performer Prudence Gruelle (1884-1966) and illustrator and cartoonist Justin Gruelle (1889-1978). Johnny Gruelle (and the Gruelle family) is best know for having created Raggedy Ann and Andy. He died on January 8, 1938.

Caption copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916)

The Riley Festival takes place this weekend, October 4-7, 2012, in Greenfield, Indiana. The four-day festival commemorates the life and work of "The Hoosier Poet," James Whitcomb Riley. Born on October 7, 1849, in Greenfield, Riley was at one time among the most popular and beloved of American poets. In addition to being a poet, Riley was a newspaper columnist, a public speaker, and--in his younger and leaner days--a sign painter and house painter. He is supposed to have painted the old house across the street from my family's own home.

Riley authored scores of poems which were collected in more than three dozen books. Among his most famous poems are "The Old Swimmin'-Hole," "Little Orphant Annie," and "The Raggedy Man." The last two titles inspired two younger men--Hoosiers both--in their own works. Harold Gray created "Little Orphan Annie," a comic strip that ran in newspapers for nearly ninety years. Johnny Gruelle and his family were behind Raggedy Ann, the little rag doll so well loved by American children, and drew her name from those two poems. The poem "Little Orphant Annie" is memorable for its refrain

An' the Gobble-uns'll git you

  Ef you

    Don't

      Watch

        Out!

Riley was an artist himself, but he left the illustration of his books to those more accomplished than he. They included Howard Chandler Christy, Ethel Franklin Betts, E.W. Kemble, and A.B. Frost. Perhaps no other illustrator is more closely identified with Riley's work than Will Vawter (1871-1941). Though twenty-two years separated them, Riley and Vawter were friends, based in part on their shared memories of childhood in small-town Indiana. Born in Virginia, Vawter grew up in Greenfield, Riley's home town. In 1899, Riley wrote to Vawter: "Simply you are divinely ordained to succeed. And now as I forecast you must prove it." With that, Vawter became Riley's handpicked illustrator.

Other Indiana illustrators who contributed to Riley's books included Virginia Keep Clark (1878-1962), William F. Heitman (1878-1945), and two artists of the Hoosier Group, Richard Buckner Gruelle (1851-1914) and T.C. Steele (1847-1926). (R.B. Gruelle was Johnny Gruelle's father and a friend of Riley. The two men lived close by each other in Indianapolis and Riley was a frequent visitor in the Gruelle home.) Mary Catherine McDonald (1852-1897), about whom little is known, was another Riley illustrator. Riley was also a mentor and benefactor to younger authors, including poet and illustrator Evaleen Stein (1863-1923) of Lafayette, Indiana. Among the more accomplished of Riley's illustrators was Franklin Booth (1874-1948). His full-color drawings for Riley's fantasy poem-play, The Flying Islands of the Night (1913), are simply breathtaking. Booth's interest in and knowledge of architecture are on full display in these drawings. His trademark trees, clouds, and floating and flying objects can be found in almost every image. You can see all of Booth's illustrations on a blog called "Golden Age Comic Book Stories," here.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913), an adopted Hoosier, an author, and an artist himself, defined reading as:

The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang. (From The Devil's Dictionary.)

If you substitute "poems" for "short stories" (thereby throwing Riley into the mix) and recognize that George Ade was the leading author of "humor in slang," you'll see that Indiana authors were a dominant force in American literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James Whitcomb Riley played his part in that. If he isn't well known anywhere else today, he is remembered at least in his hometown this weekend.

James Whitcomb Riley, "The Hoosier Poet," commemorated in a U.S. postage stamp in 1940.

And on a cigar box lid, on which he is called the "Hoosier Bard."

As a young man, Riley worked as a sign painter and house painter. Here is an advertisement in his own hand from 1871.

Riley was no mean artist, as this advertisement for McGrillus' Blood Tonic demonstrates. The image is from 1872 and was part of an exhibition at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, in 2011. You can read more on the website of Indiana Public Media, here.

Will Vawter was Riley's hand-picked illustrator. This image is from Farm Rhymes (1903).

In my list of Indiana artists who illustrated Riley's poems, I shouldn't forget Cobb Shinn (1887-1951) of Fillmore and Indianapolis. During the postcard craze of the early 1900s, Shinn created hundreds of designs, including this one and the one below for a series entitled "Riley Roses."

Franklin Booth illustrated Riley's book The Flying Islands of the Night from 1913. The book was published by Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis.

The Flying Islands of the Night was a rare chance for Booth to work in color. The results compare favorably with the work of any American illustrator of his day. Like Riley, Booth was the son of a hard-nosed military veteran with little understanding of his interest in the arts. Both men got a comparatively late start in life and worked for newspapers before finally meeting with success. Interestingly, neither ever married.

Text copyright 2012, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Albert A. Matzke (1881-1947)

Part Two

Sometime between September 1918 and January 1920, Albert Adolph Matzke entered Manhattan State Hospital, a psychiatric facility located on Wards Island, between Manhattan and Queens. He was in his late thirties and recently divorced at the time of his hospitalization. The enumerator of the federal census entered his name in her big book on January 9, 1920, alongside dozens of other patients. Three days earlier, Matzke's ex-wife, Prudence Gruelle, was counted along with her family in Norwalk, Connecticut. She had remarried sometime in the late 1910s. Her new husband, Leonard Barton Brown, worked in a hat factory, and her young daughter Peggy was almost three years old. If anyone today knows what happened in the Gruelle family at the time, they haven't said. In any case, Albert Matzke and Prudence Gruelle had gone their separate ways.

Matzke may have returned to the outside world sometime in the early 1920s. His illustrations appeared again in magazines--Everybody's, Metropolitan, and Scribner's--between 1921 and 1923. He also remarried, not once but twice. One of his marriages came and went: on April 28, 1928, a notice in the Indianapolis Star stated that Matzke had filed for divorce from his wife, Odette M.B. Matzke. Later that year, in October 1928, he made a trip from New York to London on board the S.S. American Trader. Whatever the purpose of his trip, he returned stateside with a new wife, young Gladys M. Adams, whom he had married in Kensington in early 1929. By 1930, Matzke had returned to his hometown, Indianapolis, where he kept his own studio and lived with his wife, their young son, and his mother, Mary, who died in 1937. (Her husband, Julius Matzke, had died in 1926.) By the early 1940s, Matzke had become the owner and manager of an apartment house in Indianapolis.

Albert A. Matzke died on November 16, 1947, in Indianapolis. His family is buried at Crown Hill Cemetery, but Matzke is not. In 1959, Matzke's widow, Gladys Matzke, funded the Albert Matzke Painting Studio at the Emison Art Center at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. That studio is no longer in existence. Gladys M. Adams Matzke Chatt died on December 30, 2002, in Wilmington, North Carolina. Her life had encompassed almost the entire twentieth century.

People bored by history and biography are bored by places, dates, and names, all the minutiae spooned out by uninspired teachers and dry, dusty text books. They mistake the yellowed scraps and worn artifacts of the past for living, breathing history. Unfortunately, those scraps are too often all that's left of the real and immediate passions, pleasures, and pains of past lives. And so we reconstruct what we can.

Long before Marilyn Monroe and The Seven Year Itch, women's skirts were lifted by updrafts. Like many cartoons of the day, Matzke's has two parts: an accomplished drawing and a mild pun for a gag.

Another drawing by Indiana illustrator Albert Matzke. Both are from Judge, circa 1910, happier days for the young artist.

Update (Apr. 12, 2016): Albert Matzke and Prudence Gruelle together, from an item in the Indianapolis News, February 27, 1915, page 19. So Matzke was also a violinist.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Albert A. Matzke (1881-1947)

Part One

Illustrator Albert A. Matzke married into one of the most prominent families in the history of Indiana art, yet after a promising start, he disappeared from view. The family were the Gruelles and they were painters, illustrators, cartoonists, and makers of Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, books, and merchandise. The patriarch of the Gruelle family was Richard Buckner Gruelle (1851-1914), a member of the renowned Hoosier Group that included T.C. Steele, J. Ottis Adams, William Forsyth, and Otto Stark. Gruelle and his wife, Alice Benton Gruelle, had three children, artists all. Johnny Gruelle (1880-1938) was of course the creator of Raggedy Ann and Andy. He was also a cartoonist, illustrator, and painter, as was his younger brother Justin Gruelle (1889-1978). Prudence Gruelle (1884-1966) shared in the family's talent for art, but she was also a singer and won scholarships to the Grand Conservatory of Music and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. She sang for a time with the Aborn Opera Company, but sometime around 1910 she went on the vaudeville circuit as "Prudence Grue, The Singing Cartoonist." She was on hand in 1910 when the Gruelle family purchased a piece of property in Silvermine, Connecticut. That property included an old mill they would use as their studio. One of the artists who would share that studio was Albert Matzke.

Albert Adolph Matzke was born on August 8, 1881, in Indianapolis and attended the new Manual Training High School as the nineteenth century came to a close. He studied art under Otto Stark and Richard B. Gruelle and was already an illustrator for an Indianapolis newspaper at age eighteen. Sometime around the turn of the century, Matzke set off for New York and its Art Students League, where his teachers included Frank V. Dumond and George Bridgman. As early as 1903 and as late as 1907, Matzke was a member of the faculty at the Art Students League. As an illustrator, he contributed to Judge and other magazines of the early twentieth century. He also illustrated a number of books during the 1910s. At the outset of World War I, he was teaching high school and illustrating magazines for the Crowell Publishing Company in New York, publishers of Woman's Home Companion and The American Magazine. And then he seems to have disappeared.

Biographers of the Gruelle family have almost nothing to say about Albert Matzke. They have only a little more to say about his wife, Prudence Gruelle. Although both came from Indiana, they also both studied in New York, and both were members of the thriving art colony at Silvermine. Yet there isn't any mention of how or where they met or of when or where they were married. By 1910, Prudence Gruelle was sharing a home (in Manhattan) and a last name with Albert Matzke. Within a decade they were divorced. By 1920, Prudence was remarried (to a man named Leonard Barton Brown) and had a two-year-old-daughter. And Albert Matzke? He dropped out of sight. Only recently did I find out where he went.

To be concluded . . .

Albert Matzke's frontispiece for The Woman of Mystery (1916) by Maurice Leblanc. This is one of several books illustrated by Matzke between 1915 and 1917--before he disappeared from view. 

Matzke's wife, Prudence Gruelle, was something of a mystery herself. Though known on the vaudeville stage as "Prudence Grue, The Singing Cartoonist," she was trained as a singer of opera and classical music. In 1912, her remarkable profile was displayed on the cover of the sheet music for "In Dixie Land with Dixie Lou." The decorations on the cover are by an artist named Starmer. 

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Airplanes

At the fin de siècle, artists in popular magazines tried to visualize life in the twentieth century. Albert Levering (1869-1929), trained as an architect but with the mind of a cartoonist, excelled at humorous depictions of the future. This drawing appeared on the back cover of Puck, the humor magazine, on October 7, 1908.

Lucille Webster Holling (1900-1989) may not have been as well known as her husband (children's book author and illustrator Holling Clancy Holling), but as this travel poster shows, she was a talented artist in her own right. (Update, June 11, 2014: This image is not in fact a travel poster but an illustration from Kimo: The Whistling Boy by Alice Cooper Bailey (1928). You can read more about the artist here.)

Frederick Coffay Yohn (1875-1933) began his career as an illustrator of historical scenes for slick magazines such as Scribner's. Near the end, he painted pictures like this one for pulp magazines.

"Gretta" was Joseph Clemens Gretter (1904-1988), an illustrator of children's books, including Wing for Wing by Thomas Burtis (1932). Here are the endpapers for the book.

The cover of Adventure magazine from November 1911, created by Charles Buckles Falls (1874-1960?).

Justin Gruelle (1889-1978) painted his "Early Birds Mural" in the early 1940s. After many travels and travails, the mural has finally come to rest at the Indiana Historical Society in the artist's birthplace of Indianapolis.

Captions copyright 2010 Terence E. Hanley