Robert J. Wildhack (1881-1940)

Illustrator, poster artist, and comedian Robert J. Wildhack was born on August 27, 1881, in the central Illinois town of Pekin and attended high school in Indianapolis, where he studied under Otto Stark. After graduating from Manual Training High School in 1899, Wildhack worked as an illustrator for the Indianapolis Sentinel before moving to New York City in 1901. With a year's study under Robert Henri at the Chase School of Art (where his classmates included Glenn O. Coleman, Walter Jack Duncan, Rockwell Kent, Coles Phillips, Edward Hopper, and Guy Pene du Bois), Wildhack began his art career in New York with a sign painting firm. He mixed pigments for ten months before moving on to work as a designer with an advertising agency. Before long, Wildhack's drawing and design work had caught the editor's eye at McClure's magazine, and by the 1910s, Wildhack had become one of the top cover artists and poster artists in America. Among his clients were The Century, Collier's, Life, The Reader, Scribner's, and Success.

Shortly before America's entry into World War I, Wildhack joined Charles Dana Gibson, Henry Reuterdahl, and others in the establishment of the Division of Pictorial Publicity of the Committee on Public Information. Between April 1917 and November 1918, the division provided both government and non-government agencies (such as the Red Cross) with hundreds of posters, cards, and cartoons in support of the war effort. The most famous of these works was undoubtedly James Montgomery Flagg's iconic "Uncle Sam Wants You!" poster.

As a boy in Indianapolis, Wildhack sang in a quartet and developed a talent for mimicry. His talents carried him into the vaudeville theater, his most memorable routine being a catalogue of "Snores and Sneezes," recorded by Victor Records around 1915.  His other recorded routines included "Unnatural History" and "Unnatural History II." After the war ended, Americans began turning away from magazines and towards the silver screen for their entertainment. Wildhack followed the trend by relocating to southern California in 1920. During the thirties, he hosted his own radio show and reprised his early routines on stage and in the movies. In Life Begins at 8:40, a Broadway hit during 1934-1935, Wildhack gave a comic lecture on "Sound Phenomena," scientifically classifying snores such as 2d, "The Westinghouse Airbrake," and 2f, "The Troubled Conscious." As Professor Hornblow, he repeated the routine in Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), starring Jack Benny and Eleanor Powell.  In Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), Wildhack went from snorer to sneezer. He played a somewhat less comic role as Rudolph Herzing in Back Door to Heaven in 1939.

A modest career in the movies came to an unfortunate end with Wildhack's death on June 19, 1940, in Montrose, California. Coincidentally, another, more notable screen comedian, Charlie Chase, died on the same day.

A cover by Robert Wildhack for Scribner's magazine, 1910.

And another for Life, 1912. Wildhack was also known as a poster artist, but as his designs show, there wasn't much difference between a poster and the near poster-sized magazine covers of his day.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 by 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

C.L. Moore (1911-1987)

This month--January 2011--marks the one-hundreth anniversary of the birth of C.L. Moore, one of the great early writers of science fantasy and science fiction and an illustrator of her own work. She is remembered now for her first published story, "Shambleau" (1933), and for the story's protagonist, the clear-eyed interplanetary adventurer known as Northwest Smith. Moore is also credited with having created the first heroine in the field of heroic fantasy, Jirel of Joiry (1934), and for one the first treatments of cybernetics in science fiction with "No Woman Born" (1944). Although Moore's fame rests on her writing, she was also an illustrator. Unfortunately, her illustrations lie hidden in old copies of Weird Tales magazine and have apparently not been reprinted during the last seven decades.

Catherine Lucile (or Lucille) Moore was born on January 24, 1911, in Indianapolis, Indiana. She was a sickly child and spent her early years mostly at home. She attended Indiana University for a year and a half but was forced by the vicissitudes of the Great Depression to go to work. She found a job as a secretary to a banker in Indianapolis and spent most of the 1930s typing during the day and writing at night. Long an admirer and reader of fantastic fiction, Moore jumped for joy when Weird Tales accepted "Shambleau" for publication in its November 1933 issue. Weird Tales, "The Unique Magazine," would print fourteen more of her stories of Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry before the decade was out. Moore may have illustrated just one of them, "The Dark Land" (Jan. 1936). She also provided the illustrations for her own story, "Nymph of Darkness," for Fantasy Magazine (Apr. 1935). Weird Tales aficionado Robert Weinberg called her illustrations "very good and fairly weird in nature," and until they show up again in the public eye, we'll have to take his word for it.

In 1940, C.L. Moore left her hometown to marry science fiction writer Henry Kuttner (1915-1958). The best man at the young couple's wedding was Virgil Finlay (1914-1971), one of Kuttner's close friends and an up-and-coming illustrator in his own right. In lieu of Moore's own illustrations, I can only offer art created by others for her stories. Finlay is one of those illustrators.

Despite the fact that C.L. Moore is still widely admired and her stories are continually reprinted, her centennial year may in fact go unnoticed, except here, at Indiana Illustrators.

Catherine Moore's story, "Black God's Kiss," made the cover of Weird Tales in October 1934, less than a year after the magazine published her first story, "Shambleau." That issue was a grand slam for women inasmuch as the cover illustration was by Margaret Brundage, one of few women at work in fantasy art of the 1930s, the cover story was by C.L. Moore, and the cover character, Jirel of Joiry, was the first heroine in the genre of heroic fantasy. I should mention that it was a good issue for Hoosiers, too: both of the authors mentioned on the cover lived in Indiana at one time or another.

In 1937, Moore collaborated with her future husband, Henry Kuttner, on "Quest of the Starstone," published in the November issue of Weird Tales. The story was a collaboration of another kind: Moore's characters, Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry, also teamed up, despite being separated by a seemingly unbridgeable gap in time and space. The illustration is by Virgil Finlay.

By 1950, when "Earth's Last Citadel" was published, C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner had become the writingest team in science fiction. Unfortunately, within a decade, Kuttner would be in his grave and his widow's career as a writer would have almost come to its end. Once again, Virgil Finlay provided the illustration for his friends' story.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Sanford Tousey (1883-1961)

Thomas Sanford Tousey was born on May 28, 1883, into the wild and wooly West, into a world full of cowboys and Indians, horses and horsemen, and gents who sported big whiskers and carried pistols in their hip pockets. Growing up on a thoroughbred ranch in east Kansas must have been exciting for the future artist, but when Tousey was just eight years old, his family gave up life in the West and moved to Indiana. Throughout his childhood, Tousey returned to his great-grandfather’s ranch near the Potawatami Indian Reservation, to relive the Western way of life he had left behind. He later recounted his experiences in his first children’s book, Cowboy Tommy (1932).

Sanford Tousey (as he came to call himself) graduated from high school in Anderson, Indiana, in 1902.  For two years prior, he had earned seven dollars and fifty cents per week drawing daily chalk-plate cartoons for the Anderson Morning Herald. Most of that income went towards schooling at the Art Institute of Chicago under J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951) and Frederic William Goudy (1865-1941). After that, Tousey went further east, to Wilmington, Delaware, for studies under Howard Pyle (1853-1911), and to the Art Students League in New York. He finished art school in Paris and before long settled into a career as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist in New York. For the next twenty years or so, he made sales to leading popular magazines, including Ballyhoo, Collier’s, Harper’s, Judge, Liberty, Life, Puck, The Saturday Evening Post, and Scribner’s.

During the early 1930s, Tousey gave up freelancing and turned to writing and illustrating children’s books. Over forty titles followed the publication of Cowboy Tommy in 1932, most involving cowboys, Indians, horses, and the Old West. Tousey became one of the bestselling children’s book authors of his day. In addition to authoring and illustrating a series of biographies of famed westerners such as Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, and Jim Bridger, Tousey illustrated books by others, including Boy on Horseback (1935) by Lincoln Steffens.

Tousey retired in the mid-1950s and died on June 28, 1961, at his home in Monroe, New York. His papers are at the University of Kansas.

Books by Sanford Tousey and Illustrated by Sanford Tousey

Cowboy Tommy: The Story of a Boy's Adventures on a Ranch (1932)

Cowboy Tommy's Roundup (1934)

Boy on Horseback by Lincoln Steffens (1935)

Cowboy Jimmy (1935)

Steamboat Billy (1935)

On the Golden Trail (1936)

Chinky, the Banker Pony (1937)

Jerry and the Pony Express (1937)

Whistling Bill by Florence Romaine (1937)

Chinky Joins the Circus (1938)

Daniel Boone (1939)

The Shining Mountains by Lulita Crawford Pritchett (1939)

Indians of the Plains (1940)

Stagecoach Sam (1940)

Bob and the Railroad (1941)

Ned and the Rustlers (1941, 1945)

The Northwest Mounted Police (1941)

Val Rides the Oregon Trail (1941)

Airplane Andy (1942)
Cowboys of America (1942)

Old Blue, the Cow Pony (1942, 1945)

Pack Jack Trail by Addison Talbott (1942)

Dick and the Canal Boat (1943)

Little Bear's Pinto Pony (1943)

Fred and Brown Beaver Ride the River (1944)

Trouble in the Gulch (1944)

Lumberjack Bill (1946)

Tinker Tim (1946)

Treasure Cave (1946)

Bill and the Circus (1947)

Jack Finds Gold (1947)

Davy Crockett, Hero of the Alamo (1948)

Indians and Cowboys (1948)

Kit Carson, American Scout (1949)

Toby Has a Dog by May Justus (1949)

Horseman Hal (1950)

A Pony for the Boys (1950)

Bill Clark, American Explorer (1951)

The Twin Calves (1951)

White Prince, the Arabian Horse (1951)

Cub Scout (1952)

Jim Bridger, American Frontiersman (1952)

Wild Bill Hickok, Frontier Marshal (1952)

John C. Fremont, Western Pathfinder (date unknown)

In his middle age, Tousey returned to the world of his youth, away from high society and automobiles and to the Old West. Cowboy Tommy (1932) was his first book for children. Cowboy Jimmy (1935), shown here, followed close on its heels. More than three dozen books on cowboys, horses, Indians, and explorers followed over the next two decades. If Tousey is remembered today, it is for his books for children.

Before The New Yorker came along in the 1920s, magazine cartoons typically looked like this drawing by Sanford Tousey, from Judge, circa 1910. Take away the caption (and the fanciful element) and this cartoon could be an illustration for a short story.

Puck, Judge, and Life--the three great humor magazines of the time--were published in New York for a big-city, East-Coast crowd. Class and money were frequent topics of the cartoons and illustrations they published. So was new technology. Sanford Tousey specialized in depicting the automobile and the comic aspects of early motoring, as in this cartoon, also from Judge, also from about 1910.

Revision (March 31, 2021): A photograph of Sanford Tousey, the first I have ever seen. This is from Judge, August 25, 1917. Thanks to Alex Jay for providing the link.

Revised and updated on July 25, 2020.

Text copyright 2010, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Detectives

"Sherlock Holmes Umpires Baseball," a spoof of the popular character, ran in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1906, illustrated either by Dok Hager (1858-1932) or his son, George Hager (1885-1945), both of whom were Hoosiers and both cartoonists.

Perhaps in answer to Sherlock Holmes, E.W. Hornung created Raffles, a "gentleman cracksman" who lived on the opposite side of the law. Frederick Coffay Yohn (1875-1933) was the illustrator for Raffles' American editions. Hornung by the way was the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes' creator.

Turn-of-the-century humorist John Kendrick Bangs wrote comic versions of popular books and characters. A frequent collaborator was illustrator and cartoonist Albert Levering (1869-1929), who drew this picture for Mrs. Raffles (1905), Bangs' account of the adventures of Raffles' widow. Yohn drew the straight version, Levering the takeoff. Both were Hoosiers.

John McCutcheon (1870-1949) and George Ade (1866-1944) were friends and schoolmates at Purdue University. They spent much of their lives in Chicago, though, and collaborated often. Their book, Bang! Bang! (1928), recounted the investigations of boy detective J.P. Davenant, pictured here. From The Murder Book: An Illustrated History of the Detective Story (1971) by Tage la Cour and Harald Mogensen.

Astrogen Kerby, "Astro," was a different kind of detective, a palmist and fortuneteller who investigated crimes. He appeared in The Master of Mysteries by Gelett Burgess (1912), with pictures by Indiana illustrator George Brehm (1878-1966). From The Murder Book.

Finally, The Strange Case of Mason Brant by Neville Monroe Hopkins (1916) with illustrations by Gayle Porter Hoskins (1887-1962).

Captions copyright 2010, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Paul Adam Wehr (1914-1973)

During the middle part of the twentieth century, one magazine and one artist dominated the look of illustration in popular magazines. The magazine was The Saturday Evening Post. The artist of course was Norman Rockwell. Countless journals had disappeared during the Great Depression and the lean years of World War II. Many others had turned to photography for their main source of illustration. The Saturday Evening Post marched ever onward, though, with art created not only by Norman Rockwell but also by a younger generation that included John Falter, Stevan Dohanos, Mead Schaeffer, and many other realists working at a time when realism was no longer the fashion in art.

Paul Adam Wehr was one of those realists. Tall, boyish, and mild mannered, Wehr was an extremely talented watercolorist and an accomplished illustrator and commercial artist. He was born on May 16, 1914, in Mount Vernon, Indiana. Encouraged by his father, Wehr entered the Herron School of Art at age nineteen and received his bachelor of fine arts in 1938. He began teaching at Herron in 1937, and in two stints at the school (1937-1946 and 1952-1954), he rose to head of the commercial art department.

After World War II, Wehr struck out on his own as a commercial artist with the Stevens-Gross Studio of Chicago. Working at home and sending his artwork by bus to Chicago, Wehr provided art to a variety of clients including Braniff Airlines, Coca-Cola, Ford, International Harvester, Libby, Parker Pens, Standard Oil, Swift, the U.S. Air Force, and he observed, "practically every brand of beer made."  Collier's, Coronet, Country Gentleman, Popular Mechanics, Redbook, Sports Afield, This Week, and True were among the many magazines for which he created crisp, idealized scenes of American life. It is this style, exemplified by the work of Norman Rockwell, that has given us our popular and nostalgic image of the 1940s and '50s. I'm not sure that Wehr's work ever made its way into The Saturday Evening Post, but he was certainly of that school.  Perhaps more than anyone, he deserves the title "the Norman Rockwell of Indiana."

Wehr's commercial art paid the bills, but he was also a fine artist, traveling extensively and working in watercolor and casein. His large painting, "The Molders," won him honorable mention at the Prix de Rome, held at the Grand Central Galleries in New York in 1936, while he was still a student. He won many more prizes and competitions during his near forty-year career. Paul Wehr's untimely death came on October 2, 1973, in Indianapolis. He was just fifty-nine years old.

Pictures like this were the bread and butter of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Liberty,  and Coronet after World War II. Paul Wehr, with his sure hand and painstaking technique, fit right in with artists such as Norman Rockwell and Stevan Dohanos.

An example of Wehr's commercial art and proof that he could work just as well with a contemporary subject as with an image of the nostalgic past.

Wehr's commercial clients included the makers of every kind of product, including in his words, "practically every brand of beer made." Drewry's was brewed in South Bend, about as far as you can get from the artists's native Mount Vernon and still be in the Hoosier State.

Is it fine art or commercial art? The distinction isn't always clear. In any case, this painting by Paul Wehr, from an unknown date, revisits the subject of his prize-winning "Molders" from 1936.

Text and captions copyright 2010, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Harry Grant Williamson (1866-1937)

Illustrator and landscapist Harry Grant Williamson was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on March 31, 1866. He began his art studies at the Art Students' League of Cincinnati, probably as a teenager.  He then followed the example of a group of older Hoosier artists--T.C. Steele, William Forsyth, John Ottis Adams, and Samuel Richards among them--by studying at the Royal Academy in Munich from about 1887 to 1888. From there it was on to Paris and The Hague, where Williamson became enamored of the Dutch landscape and the Dutch art that reflected it. Upon his return to his native country, Williamson enrolled at the Indiana School of Art, where he studied under Steele and Forsyth from 1891 to 1894.

In 1890, Williamson co-founded--along with Steele, Forsyth, and Adams--the Portfolio Club of Indianapolis. The club promoted art in Indianapolis with lectures, meetings, papers, and exhibits throughout the 1890s. Williamson joined his instructor, T.C. Steele, in Vernon, Indiana, in 1893 to paint landscapes. That same year, he contributed a charcoal drawing to the first issue of J.M. Bowles' Modern Art, published in Indianapolis. He also studied under Charles L. McDonald in Indianapolis during the mid-1890s. At about the same time, he worked as a cartoonist for the Indianapolis News.

Williamson's love of Dutch art drew him back to The Netherlands around the middle of the 1890s. He lived there for some time before returning once again to the United States with a Dutch wife, Sara (or Sarah), and a son, Marshall. During the early 1900s, Williamson lived in New Jersey and worked as an illustrator for Harper's, Pearson's, The Saturday Evening Post, and Success. He illustrated or co-illustrated several books including A Son of the Sun by Jack London (1912). Williamson was a member of the Salmagundi Club and the Society of Illustrators. In later years, he painted landscapes.

Williamson died on November 9, 1937, in Edgewater, New Jersey.

So much of the interior illustration for magazine fiction during the early 1900s was done with dark, gloomy charcoal. Harry Grant Williamson's work was no exception. However, as his frontispiece for Vaiti of the Islands by Beatrice Grimshaw (1908) shows, he was capable of working nicely in color media as well.

We look upon illustration of the golden age with nostalgia, realizing that we have lost something in our headlong rush into the future. But the world that read finely made magazines also did its laundry with a tub and a washboard, as in this warm and charming picture by Williamson from 1905.

The previous picture anticipates developments in illustration for the twentieth century. This one harkens back to the nineteenth.

Text copyright 2010, 2024 Terence E. Hanley