Mad Anthony Wayne by Ursula Koering (1921-1976)

Ursula Koering (1921-1976) illustrated children's books as well as articles and stories in children's magazines. She was associated for many years with Golden Press and the Western Publishing Company. Today I found a magazine with three of her illustrations. The magazine is The Golden Magazine for Boys and Girls. Her illustrations are in a historical article called "Anthony Wayne's Cattle Drive" (Part III) by Martha Brown. The date was March 1968, fifty-six years ago as I write. The culminating event in Martha Brown's article is the attack by Anthony Wayne and Casimir Pulaski on the British at Haddonfield, New Jersey, on March 1, 1778, one hundred forty-six years ago this month.

Here are Ursula Koering's three illustrations:

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Pictures for Christmas

The year is almost over, but before it ends, I want to offer a few pictures for the season and wish everyone a Merry Christmas!

First, a charming illustration by John Dukes McKee (1899-1956) of Kokomo, from My American Heritage, collected by Ralph Henry and Lucile Pannell (1959).

Next, the cover design for More About the Live Dolls by Josephine Scribner Gates (1906), an drawing created by Virginia Keep (1878-1962) of Indianapolis.

Not everyone who puts on a Santa suit is nice. Sometimes they can be naughty, as in this illustration by John A. Coughlin (1885-1943), a Chicagoan who studied at the University of Notre Dame. (For that I think we can call him a Hoosier.) The illustration is from Detective Story Weekly, December 19, 1925.

Finally, what the season is really about, an image of the birth of Jesus Christ by Sister Esther Newport (1901-1986) of Clinton, Indiana, from the book A Bible History: With a History of the Church by Rev. Stephen J. McDonald and Elizabeth Jackson (1932, 1940).

Text and captions copyright 2018, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Florence Sarah Winship (1900-1987)

Florence Sarah Winship was born on October 28, 1900, in Elkhart, Indiana, to William H. and Louie M. Winship. In 1910 and 1920, she was enumerated in the U.S. census with her family in Elkhart. By 1922, she was in Chicago, the city in which she would live and work for the next two or three decades. Chicago was also the city in which Florence received her art education. As so many Indiana artists have done, especially artists from the northern part of the state, she studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1922, she traveled to Havana, Cuba. In 1925, she went on a longer trip to France. She returned to the United States on the luxury ocean liner S.S. Paris.

Florence S. Winship moved into the new Palmolive Building in Chicago in 1929. There she kept an art studio while living in the Park Dearborn Apartments with her older sister Katherine L. Winship. I have found a Florence S. Winship in the 1940 U.S. census, in Chicago and working as the operator of a beauty shop. I can't say whether that Florence S. Winship was our artist, but in the 1940s, her career as an illustrator of children's books and coloring book covers began to take off. Her name appeared in a city directory of Elkhart in 1955. She was then listed as an artist. Even so, she kept open her connections to people and places in Chicago. She also did programs at libraries and in front of women's groups in and around that city. These were travelogs and films about animals and nature, some or all of which she shot herself. Of special note is a film called "Come Into My Garden," shot in Florence's own garden in Deerfield, Illinois, and featuring the monarch butterflies for which she grew milkweed and provided habitat over the years.

The books illustrated by Florence Sarah Winship are too many to list here. I'm not sure that anyone could easily come up with a complete or even near complete count. In any case, she worked for many years as a freelance artist for Western Printing and Lithographing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. Her rise in that field seems to have coincided with a decision by Western in the early 1940s to print a series of colorful, durable, and affordable children's books. These were the now classic and near ubiquitous Little Golden Books. Other series issued by Golden Press and Whitman followed, among them Cozy-Corner Books, Tell-a-Tale Books, Top Top Tales Books, Golden Cloth Books, and Golden Shape Books with their distinctive die-cut shapes. Florence specialized in stories about children, animals--especially cats, dogs, and horses--Christmas, ABCs, and counting. She also did covers for Whitman coloring books. Fortunately for us, she signed her works, and so we can find them pretty easily today, more than thirty years after her death.

Florence S. Winship had a long career as an artist on books for children. She died in March 1987 at age eighty-six.

I'll close with the book by which I discovered Florence Sarah Winship, Circus Color-By-Number, from 1966. That's her artwork on the cover. The interior illustrations were by Becky and Evans Krehbiel.

Text copyright 2018, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Indiana Illustrators in Puck and Life

More than a couple of Indiana illustrators did work for Puck, Judge, and the old Life humor magazines. Two of the earliest and most well known were Albert Levering (1869-1929) of Hope, Indiana, and Walter H. Gallaway (1870-1911) of Pendleton and Indianapolis. Following is some of their art.

Life, Auto Number, January 19, 1905, with cover art by Albert Levering. In addition to being an illustrator, Levering was a cartoonist. His training as an architect showed through in his precision and complete confidence in depicting buildings and machinery.

Levering may not have been right on the timing or appearance of the vehicles shown here, but he foresaw that horses would one day become pets rather than beasts of burden. Note the lap-horse held by the woman on the right. It probably won't be long before miniature horses are called "therapy animals" or "service animals" and that you'll find them sitting next to you on the plane.

Levering's cartoon portrait of Mark Twain, here used as the cover of a color insert in Life, July 13, 1905, became one of his more well-known works.

In the early 1900s, caricaturists often depicted well-known men as having big heads and little bodies. Here, with William Howard Taft, Levering did the opposite. The result is funny, though not very flattering to our heaviest of presidents.

You don't have to know who William Waldorf Astor was to gain some insight into his personality and character by way of Albert Levering's very devastating caricature from Life, 1905. 

One hundred years ago this season, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was in a bit of a pickle. His country was losing its war and he was only a few months away from abdicating his throne and fleeing to Holland. In 1905, Albert Levering caricatured him for Life, and though this portrait isn't as devastating as the one above of Astor, the artist nevertheless had his fun. Note "der Kaiser's" own self-portrait and book of poems. Note also the little cannon, which became a very big howitzer--Big Bertha--just a few years after this drawing was made. The Kaiser is just another example of how personal and psychological failings on a very individual level can have outsized effects on history and the rest of humanity. We are today still paying the price for those kinds of failings, one hundred years after the end of the Great War. 

Albert Levering was most active during the Progressive Era when trusts were seen as a great enemy and trust-busting was a favorite activity among politicians. Trusts, here disguised as corpulent girls (they're probably supposed to be caricatures of a real-life person but I don't know who that might have been) dance around a man (is he supposed to represent the public?) in a drawing captioned "A Maypolitical Party" (a somewhat clumsy pun on "Maypole Party"). The month for this issue of Puck is obvious, but I can't read the year. Sorry for the poor image. What we need, I think, is a complete and easily accessible, searchable, portable, and necessarily digital version of Puck for all to see.

Walt Gallaway did at least two covers for Puck, this one from June 26, 1901 . . .

And this one, from September 13, 1903. Note the very Hoosier-looking men with big bellies, big, unkempt beards, slouch hats, big boots, and baggy pants.

Text copyright 2018, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Leo James Beaulaurier (1911-1984)

Painter, illustrator, and muralist Leo James Beaulaurier was born on May 10, 1911, in Great Falls, Montana. We can call him a Hoosier for his three years of study at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Beaulaurier also studied at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and worked odd jobs and in construction until 1963, when he began painting full time. Beaulaurier specialized in scenes of the American West and is known for his portraits of American Indians on black velvet. Leo James Beaulaurier died in Great Falls, Montana, on February 11, 1984.

A portrait of Sitting Bull.

Boss Ribs by Beaulaurier.

Finally, a complete tableau of the Great American West.

Text copyright 2016, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Eugene Mumaw (1930-2006)

Fred Eugene Mumaw was an artist almost unknown in his time and in ours. That was and is an unfortunate state of affairs, for he was a talented man with a unique style. Born on April 3, 1930, Mumaw loved cartoons and cartooning, evidently from an early age as so many cartoonists do. He graduated from Muncie Central High School in 1948 and worked in quality control for Ball Corporation for forty-seven years. Mumaw also created posters for the Muncie Civic Theatre for a quarter of a century. You can view them at the Ball State University Libraries Digital Media Repository by clicking here. A member of St. Lawrence Catholic Church in Muncie, Mumaw died on September 12, 2006, in Muncie and was buried at Elm Ridge Memorial Park in the city of his birth.

Time was when kids who wrote to well-known cartoonists would receive in return a piece of original art. Here is an example from Eugene Mumaw's collection, a daily comic panel of Toonerville Folks, inscribed to him "with the compliments of Fontaine Fox."

Mumaw's cartoony illustrations are marked by simplicity, humor, and a sure touch. This and all the illustrations below were done, I believe, with gouache or opaque watercolor. Update: A comment below indicates that Eugene Mumaw used cut paper in creating his art. I can't say whether all of these illustrations are done with cut paper or with some other media.

Mumaw's art has been selling on the Internet for some time. His undated pinup-type drawings are especially popular.

These might fall generally into the category of "good girl art," one that was popular in the 1940s and '50s among comic book artists and magazine illustrators.

The renowned "Vargas Girl" from Esquire magazine is an example of good girl art. Eugene Mumaw's pin-ups may have been his take on the Vargas-type girl.

To me, they are far more innocent.

And I think you an tell that the artist was having great fun drawing them.

Here's to remembering a nearly forgotten Indiana illustrator, Eugene Mumaw of Muncie.

Revised and undated January 12, 2020.

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Indiana Pioneers-Transportation

Today the Hoosier State of Indiana enters its two-hundreth year, for on December 11, 1816, it was admitted to the Union as the nineteenth state. Of the forty-eight contiguous states, Indiana is the smallest located west of the Appalachians. Nonetheless, it has made outsized contributions to the nation's culture and history, being first, most, and only in many categories, including agriculture, military service, manufacturing, automobiles, aviation, space exploration, education, literature, and art.

Ours is a state of pioneers. Whether in a flatboat, covered wagon, airplane, or spacecraft, Hoosiers have led the way. In observance of Indiana's pioneering efforts in transportation, I offer a number of illustrations by an artist who was herself descended from Indiana pioneers, Clotilde Embree Funk (1893-1991) of Princeton.

Postscript: The New York Times has cited my biographical article on Clotilde Embree Funk. The Times' article is called "Draw, She Said," and the author is David W. Dunlap. Mr. Dunlap's article is dated December 9, 2015, and it includes a photograph of Clotilde. In her hand is what Rooster Cogburn would have called "a big horse pistol." Believe it or not, when the picture was taken in 1926, Clotilde was target shooting in the basement of the Times Tower.

Happy Bison-tennial, Indiana!

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley