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

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

Frank Vietor (1919-2006)

Francis E. "Frank" Vietor was born on December 21, 1919, in Poland, a small town in Clay County, Indiana. He served as a photographer and illustrator in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, including time in North Africa and Italy. After the war, he worked as an illustrator with Paton Studios in Indianapolis and graduated from the Herron School of Art in 1948. A decade later, in 1958, he and Jim Bradford formed their own advertising studio, Bradford and Vietor, in Indianapolis.

After many years as an advertising artist, Frank Vietor began painting landscapes and pictures of trains. "I've always loved trains," he wrote in 1984, "and we have a model railroad layout in the garage which competes with the car for the space." Working in acrylic and gouache (opaque watercolor), Vietor specialized in scenes of small towns. "The small towns I paint are typical of midwest rural America," he explained. His small-town landscapes typically show a view from a distance, where town gives way to country.

Frank Vietor died in March 2006 at age eighty-six.

"Summertime," a small painting that looks like a piece of advertising art or commercial art, but alone might be considered a genre painting.

"Man with a Jug"

A very charming still-life called "Indiana State Fair." Again, this painting has the look of a commercial work of art, perhaps the cover of a booklet, but is capable of standing on its own.

"Railway Landscape," a small painting of a large and powerful subject and one of Frank Vietor's specialties.

"Winter in Brookville"--Frank Vietor wasn't the first Indiana artist to paint in Brookville, an old town in the eastern part of the state, nor will he be the last.

Images courtesy of Fine Estate Art. 
Text and captions copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Walter H. Gallaway (1870-1911)

Walter H. Gallaway was one of the most accomplished of Indiana illustrators from the early twentieth century. He drew cartoons and illustrations for the three main humor magazines of his day, Puck, Judge, and Life, while his talent for cartooning landed him in a tug-of-war between Hearst and Pulitzer papers in New York City. Because of that, he became one of the first artists from the Hoosier State to draw a Sunday comic strip. Sadly, Walter Gallaway died at age forty and his name has almost been forgotten.

Walter H. Gallaway was born in Pendleton, Indiana, on October 10, 1870, and moved with his family to Indianapolis at age fifteen. He didn't care for high school and left after two years to study art under William Forsyth at the Indiana School of Art. At age twenty, Gallaway set out for New York City, determined for a career in the theater. He studied at the Art Students League but was forced to return to his Indiana home for lack of finances after only a year. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, Gallaway drew pictures for the Indianapolis News, using his position as a springboard for a return to New York. By 1900 he was back in the Big Apple and sharing living quarters with Frederick Coffay Yohn, a fellow Indiana artist.

For the next several years, Gallaway bounced back and forth between the New York Journal and the New York World. He also cartooned for the New York Herald and the Boston Herald. In addition to drawing cartoons and illustrations for those two papers, Gallaway contributed to humor magazines, as well as to Munsey's Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. He joined the ranks of early Sunday comic strip cartoonists with Citizen Fixit, Absent Minded Augie, Louis Laughs, and Was There Ever a Boy Like Barney Blue, all between 1903 and 1908. The only native-born Hoosier that I know to have preceded him as a comic strip artist was Roy W. Taylor of Richmond.

Walter Gallaway died on September 7, 1911, at his home in Westport, Connecticut, and was buried in Brooklyn.

Text copyright 2012, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Wilson Reed Berry (1851-1928)

On Easter Sunday, March 23, 1913, after two days of high winds, heavy rains began to fall on the northern Indiana town of Logansport. By Tuesday, March 25, the Wabash River was out of its banks and beginning to inundate the city. Located at the confluence of the Eel River and the Wabash River, the longest in Indiana, Logansport was under water for three days. Miraculously, by noon on Friday, a week after the winds had begun, the river was back in its banks and Logansport had begun its recovery from that great and memorable flood.

Just east of where the Eel River flows into the Wabash, Biddle's Island saw severe damage and destruction that spring. Both bridges to the island were out, one a wreck, the other swept away. A large house on the island, called appropriately enough “Island Home,” was also flooded. Built in the previous century by John Tipton, Island Home was long the residence of Horace P. Biddle (1811-1900), a lawyer, judge, poet, musicologist, and member of the Indiana constitutional convention of 1850. His house on Biddle’s Island "was filled with flowers, music, art, and the largest private library in Indiana of more than 8,500 books." (1) An insatiable reader and largely self-taught, Biddle died in 1900. His house was eventually acquired by another autodidact, Wilson Reed Berry, a man who, in contrast, was not known to have read a book in his lifetime. The flood of 1913 inundated Island Home and damaged or destroyed Berry's collection of paintings and pioneer artifacts, as well as (presumably) a letter from Queen Victoria congratulating Berry on his success as an artist. Despite the loss of his home and prized possessions, Berry soldiered on, painting until the end of his life.

Wilson Reed Berry, nicknamed Wils or Wiltz, came from a large Indiana farm family. He was born on April 22, 1851, in Cass County, the seventh of John H. and Harriett Reed Berry's thirteen children. Descended from a Revolutionary War veteran, Wils Berry grew up near Adamsboro, Indiana. As a boy he was more interested in drawing and painting than any other profession or trade. At age twenty-one and encouraged by an older local artist, John Forgy, Berry submitted some drawings to the Beldon Atlas Company of Chicago. Hired as a sketch artist, Berry traveled for ten years over thirty states and into Canada, drawing and painting landscapes and pictures of farms and animals. Berry also drew the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, a work that was later sent to the royal family, the same work that won him accolades from Queen Victoria.

Berry's mother died in 1872 and his father remarried in 1874. Wils Berry may have met his future wife at his father's wedding. Her name was Emma Conner and she had good reason to be there, for her mother, Ellen Sackett Conner, was John Berry's bride. Wils Berry and Emma Conner were married on January 30, 1878, in Cass County. The young couple took a stagecoach across an iced-over Lake Ontario for their honeymoon trip. By year's end, they had had a son, Murillo, born in Canada on December 9, 1878. In their travels, the Berry family lived in hotels and boarding houses. In 1880, they were in Luzerne, Pennsylvania. Nineteen hundred found them back in Indiana, on a Fulton County farm. Eventually they returned to their home county to the south and settled in Logansport.

In the mid 1890s, Wils Berry taught painting at Michael's College (formerly Smithson College), located north of Logansport at the summit of College Hill. Nearly two decades before a flood destroyed his home, a fire burned the main college building on October 6, 1896, leaving a mere shell of blackened brick and Berry without a job. Berry's daughter remembered the event: "My mother and I were shopping when that happened. She thought it might have been our house on fire when she saw the smoke. My father didn't really lose anything in the fire, but the college was destroyed and they never rebuilt it." (2) To make up for the lost employment, Berry began giving private art lessons to the young ladies of Logansport. It was not uncommon after that to see him and his students about town, painting en plein air. (3)

By 1910, Berry was living on Biddle's Island with his family gathered around him. In addition to Berry’s wife Emma, there was their oldest child, Don Murillo, a painter in oil and watercolor. (4) Younger brother Willis wielded a brush as well, but he worked as a painter of houses instead of canvases. Virgil practiced law, while Inez taught kindergarten. (The remaining child, teacher, sketch artist, and painter Percy Berry, had died nearly a decade before.) The flood of 1913 may have brought their family idyll to an end. By 1920, the Berrys lived on Gate Street in Logansport, but only Willis remained at home.

A sometime farmer and collector of paintings and artifacts from pioneer days, Berry painted and sketched throughout his life. In addition to drawing and painting pictures of family farms, he created murals, painted curtains for opera houses, and decorated circus wagons in nearby Peru, winter home of the nation's circuses. Logansport Republicans carried his painting "Abe Lincoln the Rail-Splitter" in their parades and displayed it in their headquarters. Berry also created works for hotels in French Lick and Huntington. Today his work is in the collections of  the Cass County Historical Society and the La Porte County Historical Society Museum. Wilson Reed Berry died on April 28, 1928, and is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in the county of his birth.

Notes
(1) "Judge Biddle of Biddle's Island" by Richard B. Copeland, Logansport Pharos-Tribune, May 2, 2008.

(2) Quoted in an interview of Inez Berry Brunegraff (1890-1989) in the Logansport Pharos-Tribune, date unknown.

(3) Michael's College was in operation from 1895 to 1896, hence Berry would not have taught there for long.

(4) Murillo Berry (1878-1965), also called Don or Don Murillo, was an artist like his father. Murillo's full name may in fact have been Don Murillo Berry, perhaps after the Spanish Baroque painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), or he may have assumed the name "Don" as an honorific.

Acknowledgements

I thank La Porte County Historian Fern Eddy Schultz for her extensive research on Wilson Reed Berry and his family and for her securing permission to publish Berry's painting below. Much of the information I used to write this article came from her. I also acknowledge the work of the Cass County Historical Society and Museum for their accounts of the razing of Michael's College and the flood of 1913.

Painter and illustrator Wilson Reed "Wils" Berry (1851-1928) in an undated photograph in the collection of the Cass County Historical Society and Museum.

"Granville Kesling Farm, Onward, Indiana" by Wils Berry, a watercolor owned by Dr. Peter Kesling and on display in the Kesling Room at the La Porte County Historical Society Museum, 2405 Indiana Avenue, Suite 1, La Porte, IN 46350. Photograph by Fern Eddy Schultz. These days, pictures like this one are taken from the air by pilot-photographers. In Berry's time, a sketch artist or landscape artist created views of the family farm, often more conceptual or idealized than naturalistic. And it was drawings like this one that would be reproduced in county atlases.

For example, this drawing (which may or may not have been created by Wils Berry), showing "Island Home" on Biddle's Island in Logansport, was probably printed in a county atlas. However, the source is unknown. Berry lived on Biddle's Island until the house shown here was inundated in the great flood of 1913. Judge Biddle had passed away many years before, in 1900. Despite the history of flooding, Biddles Island (without the apostrophe) is inhabited today. The foundation of Island Home may be hiding under the lawns of today's middle-class residences. Note the bridges in the foreground and background and the buildings of Logansport in the background on the left. The bridge in the foreground looks like the one in the photograph below.

The wreckage of the Biddle [sic] Island Bridge in Logansport, Indiana, following the flooding of March 25-28, 1913. I'm not familiar enough with Logansport to tell the view or if Island Home or its remains might be visible in this photograph (from the collection of the Cass County Historical Society and Museum).

For a brief time in the 1890s, Wilson Reed Berry taught painting at Michael's College in Logansport. Founded as Smithson College, the school is shown here in a photograph from the 1870s, in the collection of the Cass County Historical Society and Museum. The building, a grand Gothic structure, was reduced to a mere shell after a fire of October 6, 1896.

A view from Smithson College looking southward to Logansport. Smithson College was in operation from 1872 to  1878, but even in later years, when the facility was known as American Normal College (1883-1888) or Michael's College (1895-1896), it was still referred to as Smithson College. In any case, this photograph, in the collection of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library, is undated but probably from the 1870s.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

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, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Wilbur George Kurtz (1882-1967)

On January 19, 1861, Georgia became the fifth state to secede from the Union, joining South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and eventually six others to form the Confederate States of America. Although South Carolina seceded in 1860 and hostilities would not begin until April 1861, this month--January 2011--marks the sesquicentennial anniversary of the start of the Civil War. Indiana Illustrators offers an artist for the occasion.

Although he was born, reared, and educated in the heart of the Midwest, Wilbur George Kurtz, Sr., was an artist almost entirely identified with the South, especially his adopted home state of Georgia. He was born on February 28, 1882, in Oakland, Illinois, and grew up in Greencastle, Indiana. He attended DePauw University in Greencastle and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied under John H. Vanderpoel and Charles F. Brown. Kurtz began his art career in Chicago as a draftsman, engraver, and illustrator specializing in architectural renderings. He also lived in Indianapolis for a time.

Kurtz first saw Atlanta in 1903 and was captivated by the city. In 1911, he married a native southerner, Annie Laurie Fuller, and moved to Atlanta the following year. His home was next to a Civil War battlefield, and he became steeped in the history of Atlanta and the conflict that rent a nation. He painted a number of murals, including murals for the Georgia exhibits at the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. During the Great Depression, Kurtz assisted in the creation of a depiction of the Battle of Atlanta at the Grant Park Cyclorama.

In addition to writing books (Atlanta and the Old South and Historic Atlanta: A Brief History of Atlanta and Its Landmarks) and magazine articles on the history of Atlanta and the Civil War, Kurtz was technical advisor and historian on the films Gone with the Wind (1939), Song of the South (1946), and The Great Locomotive Chase (1956). He was a friend of Margaret Mitchell and a specialist on the Andrews Raid, the inspiration for The General (1926), starring Buster Keaton, and the Walt Disney film, The Great Locomotive Chase. His first wife was in fact the daughter of William Fuller, the conductor on board "The General" when it was taken.

Kurtz painted a number of pictures of the Old South, including preproduction paintings for Gone with the Wind, and illustrated Maum Nancy by Susan Merrick Heywood (1937). Married twice and father of five children, Wilbur George Kurtz, Sr., died in Atlanta on February 18, 1967, ten days short of his eighty-fifth birthday.

A photograph of Wilbur Kurtz and a preproduction painting for Gone with the Wind (1939). Kurtz was friends with Margaret Mitchell, author of the book from which the movie was adapted. He served as technical advisor and historian on that and other movies about his adopted South.

Kurtz specialized in architectural and historical subjects. He combined the two in this painting of Collier's Store in old Atlanta.

Once again, Kurtz's interests in history and architecture are on display in this print depicting the history of Atlanta.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley