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

Arthur Sinclair Covey (1877-1960)

Arthur Sinclair Covey was born on June 13, 1877, in Leroy, Illinois, and was reared in Missouri and in El Dorado, Kansas. In 1893, Covey "made the run" with the opening of the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma. He followed up a year at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas, with art studies in Chicago, Paris, and Munich between 1897 and 1908.

Living in Indianapolis at the turn of the century, Covey drew pictures for the Indianapolis Press before moving on to the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1901. He provided illustrations for magazines, including a series of covers for The American Magazine, during the early part of the century, but he found his life's work in painting murals. His first individual commission was for the Wichita Public Library in 1914. Perhaps his best known series is at the Kohler Company offices in Kohler, Wisconsin. That series, completed in 1921-1922, is the subject of a fine article in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, Winter 2009-2010.

Covey married artists in succession. His first wife, Mary Dorothea Sale (d. 1917), was a British citizen and a student of Frank Brangwyn in London, as Covey himself was between 1905 and 1908. In 1921, Covey married Lois Lenski (1893-1974), a children's book author and illustrator famous for her Mr. Small series. In 1928, the couple bought an eighteenth-century house in Harwinton, Connecticut. Called "Greenacres," it would be their home for the rest of Arthur S. Covey's life. One of his last major works was the ceiling of the Trinity Lutheran Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, executed in 1951 when he was seventy-four years old. Covey died nearly a decade later, on February 5, 1960.

"The Run," a lithograph by Arthur Sinclair Covey showing the run on the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma, 1893, in which the artist took part.

"Work," an etching by Covey which appeared in the Sunday Magazine of the Sunday Star, Washington, D.C., August 31, 1913.

A drawing by Covey on the subject of work. It may be a study for a mural, but I don't know the date of the drawing.

Covey's second wife was author and illustrator Lois Lenski. Every child who grew up between the 1930s and the 1970s remembers her Mr. Small series, of which there were ten titles. Policeman Small (1962) was the last.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Frederick Webb Ross (1885-1963)

Frederick Webb Ross was born in Shelbyville, Indiana, on March 19, 1885, and attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis. After studying art under William Forsyth in Indianapolis, Ross traveled to New York City, where he studied at the famed Art Students League. He also kept a studio in Washington Square. One of his instructors in New York was a fellow Hoosier, the renowned painter and teacher, William Merritt Chase (1849-1916).

A century ago, in 1911, Ross embarked for Europe, studying in France and traveling in France, Italy, and England. Little else is known of him and his career, although it is known that Ross worked as an illustrator, painter, and muralist. In June 1934, he completed a mural in his New York studio, one that was shipped to Terre Haute, Indiana, for reassembly at the Federal Building then under construction. Ross's mural, a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot triptych depicting the signing of the Magna Carta, is still in place, having survived what was for a time an uncertain fate. The Federal Building is being renovated and will soon be home to the Indiana State University College of Business. You can read more about the building and the mural on the website of the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, here.

Ross may also have been involved in architecture and interior design. He died on July 21, 1963, and was buried at St. Michael's Cemetery, East Elmhurst, New York.

"The Signing of the Magna Carta," a mural executed by Indiana artist Frederick Webb Ross and on display at the Federal Building in Terre Haute, Indiana. The photograph is by the Terre-Haute Star-Tribune. The man in the picture is unidentified. Believe it or not, this is the better of only two images I could find on the Internet showing the mural. It and the room that houses it are pretty grand. They deserve more publicity.

Revised on March 31, 2021.

Caption and text copyright 2011, 2024 by Terence E. Hanley

Reed Kinert (1911-1976)

In the early 1900s, airplanes were not just a novelty. They were a marvel, almost a miracle, and flying in one was the dream of every American boy and girl. Hoosiers figured prominently in those pioneering years of aviation. Not least among Indiana pilots of course was Wilbur Wright, born in 1867 near Millville, Indiana. Before the turn of the century, Wilbur and his Ohio-born brother Orville set up a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. In 1903, they flew an airplane of their own design and manufacture at Kill Devils Hill in North Carolina, thus launching not only their small Flyer, but also the Age of Aviation. The story of the brothers' success and their proximity to Richmond, Indiana, must have been a powerful draw for a young boy growing up there. At age twelve, future pilot and artist Reed Kinert began collecting material on aircraft and aviation, thus beginning a life devoted to things with wings.

Born on August 31, 1911, Reed Charles Kinert attended schools in his hometown before setting off for studies at the College of Los Angeles. In 1932, Kinert learned to fly in Richmond by taking lessons from a barnstorming pilot.  He operated the airport in Richmond and worked as a weather observer at the nearby Centerville Airport before becoming a barnstorming pilot of the 1930s. He also began creating illustrations for collectors and for the Vought and Aeronca aircraft companies. Between 1933 and 1947, Kinert was a flight instructor and test pilot. As an artist, Kinert designed insignia for two Navy bomber squadrons and worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for United Aircraft Corporation of America, and Beechcraft Aircraft. He also served as art director for the Aerospace Division of Librascope, Inc.

Kinert attended nearly every National Air Race beginning in 1929 and put his experiences to good use in his book, American Racing Planes and Historic Air Races (1952). He was an air racer himself for some time. Kinert wrote and illustrated books on aviation for much of his career, including his four-volume Racing Planes and Air Races: A Complete History (1967-1969). Other titles included America’s Fighting Planes in Action (1943), Our Fighting Planes: The Story of U.S. Military Aircraft of World War II (1946), and Little Helicopter (1947). His Early American Steam Locomotives: First Seven Decades, 1830-1900 (1962) was awarded a non-fiction prize by Indiana University in 1963.

In his author's note for Our Fighting Planes, published immediately after World War II, Kinert expressed feelings about flight that justify a long quotation:

Flight is the expression of spiritual achievement, the antithesis of the worn shoe and the weary foot. Flight is the opposite course to the rocky road, the long climb and the dusty plain and is the answer to an ageless human longing to see what is over the hill. In religion, they call it the instinct to immortality. With flight, peoples can battle loneliness and separation and isolation and bigotry and prejudice. With flight, free men will become more free. . . . In these pages I have made no attempt to glorify war, only flight itself, for war is hell.

Reed Kinert died on September 9, 1976, in San Diego, California. This year marks his centennial, observed here if nowhere else.

It's hard to choose just one or two pictures from Reed Kinert's book, Our Fighting Planes (1946), for display here, for there are so many beautifully done pictures among its pages. But I have always liked airplanes with an unusual configuration, so I have chosen Northrop's P-61 Black Widow, America's first airplane designed specifically for nighttime operations. 

From the same book, Boeing's workhorse, the famed B-17 Flying Fortress. The American fighter is the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, the largest and heaviest single-engine fighter of the war. (The "P" designation by the way is for "pursuit," which gave way to our current "F," for "fighter," after the war.) The airplane going down in flames is the Nazi jet, the Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe. No matter whether Kinert's illustration shows a real or fanciful event, it's still cool. And that's what this book is like. Even though Kinert was in his mid-thirties when Our Fighting Planes was published, his drawings convey all the feeling of a schoolboy's drawings of imagined heroism and adventure against the forces of evil.

Pilot, aviation enthusiast, and artist Reed Kinert of Richmond, Indiana.

Captions and text copyright 2011, 2024 by Terence E. Hanley

The Civil War

At 4:30 in the morning, on April 12, 1861--one hundred and fifty years ago today--Confederate artillery commenced its bombardment of Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina. Thirty-three hours later, the Union garrison at the fort surrendered. The next day, April 15, 1861--four years to the day before he died from an assassin's bullet--President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 troops to put down the insurrection. Thus was ushered in our great Civil War, perhaps the most profound event in American history.

In 1861, Indiana was in its forty-fifth year as a state. Its population was 1,350,428, fifth among the states. Initially, Indiana planned on filling the ranks of six regiments, about 4,600 men in all. Lew Wallace, a veteran of the Mexican war, was to serve as adjutant general and was charged with raising the needed number. So many men answered the call that some had to be turned away. By the end of the war, though, 197,141 Hoosiers had served in the Union cause, second among the states. Another 100,000 filled the ranks of the state militia. Over 25,000 of these men lost their lives. Not counted among that number is the nation's commander-in-chief, who--though he was born in Kentucky and elected from Illinois--spent his formative years in what is now Spencer County, Indiana.

The men who went to war came from all walks of life, art included. Some drew and painted scenes in their own diaries, letters, and sketchbooks. Others created works for publication. Lew Wallace (1827-1905) of Brookville and Crawfordsville was--in addition to being a lawyer, military officer, governor of New Mexico, minister to the Ottoman Empire, and author of the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century--an artist and illustrator. James Farrington Gookins (1840-1904) of Terre Haute and Indianapolis, who served with Wallace for a time, drew sketches for woodcuts published in Harper's. And Adolph G. Metzner (1834-1918) of Indianapolis kept a sketchbook of the things he witnessed during his war years. (I have written about him in a previous entry, and his work is subject of a newly published book.) Countless artists who came after them have depicted scenes of the Civil War. In any case, we commemorate the men and women who served and died during those four years that rent a nation and the century and a half since that have mended it.

The weekly newspaper was a fairly new thing in America when the Civil War began. Rapid communication by telegraph and rapid transport by train allowed publishers to stay on top of current events and to get the news out to a nation of readers in pretty short order. Photography could not yet be reproduced in the mass media. Instead, newspapers and magazines relied on line art, cut on blocks of wood and assembled into printing plates. Most woodcuts were the work of two artists, the sketch artist who submitted his work from the field and the engraver who transferred the sketch to wooden blocks, worked in a painstaking way for the production of the final image. 

Above is a woodcut from the June 22, 1861, issue of Harper's Weekly, captioned: "The Eleventh Indiana Volunteers Swearing to Remember Buena Vista, at Indianapolis, May, 1861--Sketched by Mr. James F. Gookins." Gookins was a Hoosier, a mostly self-taught artist, and a student of law at Wabash College when war broke out. He served for a time with Lew Wallace and the Eleventh Indiana Volunteer Regiment, a unit of Zouaves which saw service very early in the war. The story accompanying Gookins' drawing in Harper's:

Remember Buena Vista

On page 388 we publish a picture of a most striking scene, which occurred at Indianapolis, in the inclosure [sic] surrounding the State Capitol, a few days since. The artist from whose sketch our picture was made, Mr. James F. Gookins, of Company I, 11th Regiment Indiana Volunteers (Zouaves), writes us as follows concerning it:

The Regiment was presented by the ladies of Indiana with a splendid stand of colors, after receiving which the whole Regiment, kneeling, with uplifted right hands, took an oath before God that, with His help, they would not only avenge themselves of the insults cast at the flag of the nation, but furthermore of the contumely and wrong received by the Indiana troops at the hands of Jeff Davis during the war with Mexico. To keep this oath more continually before them they have adopted the motto "Remember Buena Vista!" as their warcry.

Another image from Harper's. The caption reads: "At Romney, Va., June 11th, 1861,--The Eleventh Indiana Zouaves, Colonel Lewis Wallace, crossing, on the double quick, the bridge over the Potomac." The artist is unknown.

The story of the Civil War is of course incomplete without Abe Lincoln. His election to the presidency was--in the minds of the secessionists--the event that precipitated the South's withdrawal from the Union. Even then, a legend had begun to build about him and his life. John T. McCutcheon (1870-1949) drew from that legend, just as so many cartoonists  have, before and since. From John McCutcheon's Book.

As a child, Franklin Booth (1874-1948) learned to draw by imitating woodcut illustrations from books and other publications. By the time Booth began working professionally as an artist, Abraham Lincoln had reached the status of an icon in American art, history, and popular imagination. This drawing, though it has the appearance of a woodcut, was actually done with a pen. It's a decoration for an unknown use. Like Lincoln, Booth grew up on an Indiana farm, in the artist's case, in Hamilton County, northeast of Indianapolis. He was perhaps the most accomplished Indiana illustrator of his time. His drawing of Lincoln here only hints at his really astonishing technique and enormous body of work.   

There are of course other illustrations by Indiana artists on the topic of the Civil War. Unfortunately, many of them are protected from usage on the Internet. If anyone has pictures to offer, please send them to me at:

info@hoosiercartoonists.com

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 by Terence E. Hanley

Clotilde Embree Funk (1893-1991)

In observance of National Women's History Month, Indiana Illustrators presents an entry on a woman who not only illustrated books on history, but also lived a fair bit of it herself during her near century on earth.

Clotilde Embree Funk was born on June 25, 1893, in Princeton, Indiana, to a pioneer family of Huguenot origin. After attending local schools in Princeton, she set off for the Tudor School and the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, where she studied from 1911 to 1913. Her art career began in earnest when she moved to New York City in 1917 to live with her older sister Louise. Clotilde studied at the Cooper Union Art School (1917-1920) and worked as a freelance commercial artist, while Louise labored away as a fifteen-dollar-a-week fashion editor.

The two advanced their careers over the next decade, and by the early 1930s, change was in the works for both. Louise Embree wrote a biography of George Washington and submitted it to a New York publisher, accompanied by younger sister Clotilde’s sketches. In rapid order, Clotilde Embree married Claude Douglas Funk (a man she had known since third grade) while on vacation in her hometown of Princeton, the book was accepted, and Clotilde spent her honeymoon working on her illustrations. In 1931, she settled in Indianapolis to raise a family, and the following year, A Child’s Life of George Washington by Louise Embree came out. Clotilde Embree was off on a new career.

Over the next three decades, Clotilde illustrated more than sixty children's books. She drew the pictures for some of the first in the "Childhood of Famous Americans" series published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis. The illustrations for biographies of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, and George Washington Carver (all by Augusta Stevenson) and Stephen Foster (by Helen Higgins) were hers. Clotilde's other books included Cecilia’s Locket and her own favorite, To See the Queen (1954). 

An injury to her wrist forced Clotilde to give up illustration in favor of painting in 1962. She studied under Martha Slaymaker, whom she called "the biggest influence on my later work." Thereafter, she exhibited in Indianapolis and elsewhere and won several prizes for her work.

Clotilde Embree Funk died at age ninety-eight on November 10, 1991, in Noblesville, Indiana. She was a small woman with a great talent, and she loved children and drawing children.

Early in her career, Clotilde Embree Funk worked in silhouette, a seemingly simple form. However, the use of three silhouettes on this cover, each of a different color and depth, adds a level of sophistication.

To See the Queen (1954) was Clotilde's favorite among her books. Not long ago, I found a copy of her book at an antique mall. Now I can present the front and back covers and the full effect of Clotilde's drawing.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 by Terence E. Hanley