Norah Hamilton (1873-1945)

Hull House, the Chicago social services agency founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams (1860-1935) closed down on Friday, January 27, 2012. The cause was lack of funds. At its peak, Hull House (or Hull-House, as it was called for many years) served 9,000 people per week with its educational classes, activities, medical help, and other services. The closing brings to an end an institution dating to 1889.

Two Indiana sisters played their parts in the operation of Hull-House during the early twentieth century. Alice Hamilton (1869-1970), a pioneer in the field of occupational health and industrial hygiene, served on the medical staff at Hull-House for three decades. In 1919, she became the first female faculty member at Harvard University. Her younger sister, Norah Hamilton, taught art and other skills at Hull-House for many years. The two sisters were part of an accomplished quartet of Hamilton women. Their sister Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) was the well-known teacher, classicist, and author of The Greek Way, The Roman Way, and other books. Margaret Hamilton (1871-1969) was also a teacher and assumed the head of the English department at Bryn Mawr Preparatory School upon Edith Hamilton's retirement. Two artist-cousins, sisters Jessie Hamilton (1864-1960) and Agnes Hamilton (1868-1961), added to the prominence of the Hamilton name. Agnes by the way was also a settlement house worker.

Etcher, designer, illustrator, and art teacher Norah Hamilton was born in November 1873 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the daughter of scholarly and well-to-do parents who encouraged their daughters to study art, literature, and the classics. Norah received instruction at the Fort Wayne School of Art under J. Ottis Adams and William Forsyth, at the Art Students League under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, and in Paris under James Abbott McNeill Whistler in 1897-1899. In the course of her European studies, Norah suffered a breakdown and repaired to a hospital in Zurich. She would battle depression for the rest of her life.

Norah Hamilton became associated with Hull-House as early as 1909. Her drawings illustrated Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (1910) and her sister Alice Hamilton's Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943). She also created a number of bookplates. Norah Hamilton taught art at Hull-House for many years, from at least 1910 to after 1930. Her art was exhibited in Paris, New York, and her hometown, Fort Wayne, Indiana.

The Hamilton women lived very long lives. Norah Hamilton was the first of them to pass away, in February 1945, at age seventy-one.

"Hull-House on Halsted Street," an etching by Norah Hamilton for the book Twenty Years at Hull-House with Autobiographical Notes (1910) by Jane Addams. Norah Hamilton lived and worked at Hull-House for many years. The illustrations shown here are from Jane Addams' book and are in the collections of Northern Illinois University.

"A Neighborhood Alley Near Hull-House"

"Sweatshop Workers"

"Aniello, a Child at Hull-House"

Text copyright 2012 Terence E. Hanley

Carl Kidwell (1910-2003)

Carl Edmund Kidwell was born on August 8, 1910, in the southwestern Indiana town of Washington. As a child he suffered from a prolonged illness that forced an end to his formal education while he was in grade school. Kidwell held a variety of jobs as a young man, including being a painter for the B & O Railroad. (I suspect that on that job, his canvas was the size of a boxcar.) During the war years, he served as a radioman aboard the USS Indianapolis, USS Quincy, PC 608 (a patrol craft), and PC 1238 (a submarine chaser). Three of those four craft were lost, two by enemy action. Kidwell's brother, Logan Kidwell, also served on the USS Quincy. Unlike Carl, Logan Kidwell didn't come home.

Carl Kidwell's art career evidently started with the U.S. Navy. Sometime during the war, he was transferred to the staff of The Chaser, the magazine of the Submarine Chaser Training Center in Miami, Florida, where he worked as a designer and illustrator. His illustrations also appeared in the magazine Our Navy. After the war, Carl Kidwell went to New York and began a career as a freelance illustrator, author, and teacher. The earliest credit I have found for him is work for Blue Book in May 1946. In the field of fantasy and science fiction, Kidwell illustrated "Music from Down Under" by Joe Kennedy for Other Worlds Science Stories (Oct. 1951) and "The Seamstress" by E. Everett Evans for Weird Tales (Jan. 1952). During the 1950s and '60s, he created illustrations for juvenile books of mystery, adventure, Western, and American history, including three of his own, Arrow in the Sun (1961), The Angry Earth (1964), and Granada, Surrender! (1968). Kidwell returned to fantasy in the mid-1960s with covers for the digest-sized Magazine of Horror and Startling Mystery Stories.

The last credit I have found for Carl Kidwell is illustration for Smugglers' Island by Martha C. King (1970). After a long life and career, he passed away on July 2, 2003, in New York City and was buried in his hometown, just a few blocks away from his boyhood home.

Text and captions copyright 2012 Terence E. Hanley

Alice Woods Ullman (1871-1959)

Author, illustrator, poster artist, and painter Alice Woods was born in Goshen, Indiana, on November 22, 1871. She attended the Girls Classical School of Indianapolis, the Indiana School of Art under William Forsyth and T.C. Steele, and the Shinnecock Summer School of Art under William Merritt Chase. She continued her art education at the Art Students League, the New York School of Art, and the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Her experiences as an art student in Paris gave her the material she needed for a novel, Fame Seekers, published in 1912.

Alice spent almost two decades in Paris and knew Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Margaret Cravens, and other members of the American art community. She married the painter Eugene Paul Ullman (1877-1953), another Chase student and a near lifelong expatriate. Together they had two sons, sculptor Allen Ullman and painter/illustrator Paul Ullman. After separating from her husband in 1914, Alice Woods Ullman returned to the United States and was associated with the artistic crowd in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Greenwich Village, New York.

Alice Woods wrote and illustrated stories for The Century, McClure’s, Pearson’s, The Smart Set, and other magazines. She also wrote six novels: Edges (1902), A Gingham Rose (1904),  Fame Seekers (1912), The Thicket (1913), The Hairpin Duchess (1924), and The Gilded Caravan (1927). In the Fame Seekers, Alice wrote: "Modern life has produced nothing more interesting, more charming or more alarming than the American girl," a sure indication of her interest in women's stories and women's themes. Perhaps she offered a commentary on her own marriage when she wrote that if the American girl, studying in Paris, ends "by marrying, [then] heaven help the man, for it is with the secret gnawing of compromise or condescension."

Alice Woods Ullman was a member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, the National Arts Club, the Woman’s Art Club of New York, and the Portfolio Club of Indianapolis. She died on July 24, 1959, in New York City.

The frontispiece of Alice Wood Ullman's 1904 novel, A Gingham Rose, created by the author herself. The drawing has a poster-like quality and is clearly influenced by the art nouveau style. It should come as no surprise that Alice was also a poster artist.

And a small monotype of eucalyptus trees, signed "Alice Woods," made perhaps before she was married to the painter Eugene Ullman. 

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Dale Van Pelt (1872-1950)

Dale Van Pelt must have had an interesting career, yet I have found out only a little about him. He was born on July 30, 1872, in Moorefield, Indiana, located not far north of Vevay, the seat of Switzerland County. His birth may have coincided pretty closely with the publication of Vevay native Edward Eggleston's popular novel The Hoosier Schoolmaster: A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana (1871), a fictional recounting of a real-life schoolteacher's experiences in neighboring Jefferson County. Eggleston's novel may offer a glimpse into what the young life of Dale Van Pelt must have been like.

In 1880, Van Pelt was enumerated in Pleasant Township in Switzerland County with his father (a physician), his mother, and other members of the family. Strangely enough (for me), Calvin Bear, my distant relative, was listed on the same page of the census book. Before the decade was out (probably in 1888), Van Pelt set off for Purdue University. Located on the edge of the prairie, Purdue would have been a far cry from the river hills of southern Indiana. Van Pelt thrived there, however. Class historian, football quarterback, president of the Emersonian Society, and art editor of the Debris (the class yearbook founded a few years earlier by John T. McCutcheon), Van Pelt must have been a big man on campus. Upon graduating in 1892 with a degree in mechanics, he went to work as an artist with the Indianapolis Sentinel. Incidentally, Van Pelt's classmates included the poet Charles Cottingham and John S. Wright. I'd like to quote from the website of the John S. Wright Center at Purdue University for more on him:

The Center is named in honor of John Shepard Wright, a member of the Purdue University class of 1892 who, in 1964, provided the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources with a generous endowment for the promotion of forestry in Indiana. Mr. Wright was a botanist, an Eli Lilly executive, and a friend of many forestry leaders in Indiana, particularly Stanley Coulter, Purdue University Professor Daniel DenUyl, and Charles C. Deam, the first state forester of Indiana. [Boldface added.]

Purdue also holds some of Van Pelt's papers, a diary with sketches from a Purdue botany class. I suspect Wright and Van Pelt studied botany together, probably under Stanley Coulter (1853-1943). They may even have been friends.

The period in Dale Van Pelt's life between 1893 (when he was working for the Indianapolis Sentinel) and 1910 (when he was enumerated in the federal census) is a mystery to me. In 1902, he married Minnie M. Wherritt of Shelbyville, Indiana. In 1910, 1920, and 1930, the census taker found him living in Chicago and working as a commercial artist, illustrator, and engraver. During his Chicago years, Van Pelt shared a household with Winnie and their children, as well as with other members of their extended family.

Dale Van Pelt would have turned fifty-eight years old in 1930. He could easily have lived for a couple of more decades. But I'm afraid I don't know his fate. 

In 1940, at age sixty-eight, Van Pelt was still living in Chicago and working as a commercial artist. He died ten years later, on or about September 11, 1950. His drawings are probably now hidden away in old bound volumes of newspapers or on reels of scratchy microfilm. A quick search might turn something up. For now, we'll have to be satisfied with an image from the Purdue Debris from over a century ago, not by him, but of him. The picture below is of the Emersonian Quartet, a vocal group with (left to right) Enos Shaw, high soprano; Dale Van Pelt, low bass (hence his proximity to the floor); Harry Scudder, fine tenor; and Charles Gough, big alto. The artist is unknown. The year was 1889.

Postscript, June 6, 2012: There is reason to believe that this drawing from The Indiana Woman, Irvington Edition, August 7, 1897, is the work of Dale Van Pelt. The time and place are right. The signature at the lower right may clinch it. If this is his work, it may be the first to be published in the last seventy years or more.

Updated on May 15, 2024.

Text copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

J. Hugh O'Donnell (1899-1977)

John Hugh O'Donnell, better known to readers of the Indianapolis News as J. Hugh O'Donnell, was born on November 20, 1899, in Indianapolis. He won a scholarship to the Herron School of Art in 1916-1917, studying under Otto Stark, T.C. Steele, and William Forsyth. At Arsenal Technical High School, O'Donnell took evening classes from Elmer Tafflinger and subscribed to C.N. Landon's correspondence course in cartooning. The young artists's earliest cartooning credits may have been for The Arsenal Cannon, his school yearbook.

O'Donnell went right to work out of high school, taking a job at the front counter of the Indianapolis News in 1919. He moved up two notches in pretty short order, first to illustrator in the advertising department, then to staff artist in the editorial department, where he rubbed elbows with Kin Hubbard, Charles Kuhn, and Gaar Williams. O'Donnell worked as a staff artist from 1923 until being drafted in 1942. He served in a military police battalion and illustrated Leo M. Litz's Report from the Pacific, published in 1946. O'Donnell switched to the Indianapolis Times after a big shakeup at the Star-News in 1948. He retired from the Times in 1955.

J. Hugh O'Donnell illustrated Hoosier poet Bill Herschell's versifying for the Indianapolis News. He also created "Lucky Dollar," a character for a Red Cross television program. Named a Sagamore of the Wabash and a Kentucky Colonel in the same year, O'Donnell won a Freedom Foundations Award in 1952 and a Lincoln National Life Foundation Award in 1951. John Hugh O'Donnell died on December 30, 1977, and was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Indianapolis.

Note: J. Hugh O'Donnell the artist should not be confused with Rev. J. Hugh O'Donnell, president of the University of Notre Dame in the 1940s.

J. Hugh O'Donnell's depiction of "The City of Indianapolis," a B-29 that completed a bombing run hours before the cessation of  hostilities between the United States and Japan, August 14, 1945. From Report from the Pacific (1946) by Leo M. Litz, war correspondent for the Indianapolis News.

Here's a Navy airplane, a PBY Catalina, nicknamed "Dumbo," picking up Ensign Calvin B. Yoder, then aged twenty-two, of Kokomo, Indiana, after his F6F5 Hellcat had been shot down in the Pacific in July 1945. Again, from Report from the Pacific. (Sorry for the blurred images--I have scanned them directly from the book.)

Another ship named "Indianapolis." This one--the U.S.S. Indianapolis--met an unhappier fate, having been torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on July 30, 1945. Of 1,196 men on board, only 316 survived, making the sinking of the ship the single greatest loss of life in the history of the United States Navy. There is a memorial to the Indianapolis in its namesake city today. Coincidentally, one of the survivors was an Indianapolis man, James E. O'Donnell. I can't say whether he is related to the artist. You can read more about the memorial at its official website, here. I'll wager that the person responsible for the website is not from Indianapolis: only foreigners call the city "Indy."

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Harvey Emrich (1884-1972)

Harvey Emrich was born in Indianapolis on October 9, 1884, and graduated from Manual Training High School in 1903. His post-secondary education came at the Herron School of Art (1903-1904), Butler University, and the Art Students League. Emrich also enjoyed the rare opportunity of studying art in France, but at the cost of going to war as a member of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. As the war was drawing to a close, John Erskine, director of the YMCA for the AEF, instituted an art program for soldiers, in which Emrich took part and advanced his studies.

During the 1920s and '30s, Emrich was a member of the artists' colony at Woodstock, New York. Henry Maust, Hanson Booth, and John Striebel were among the other Hoosiers in residence there. Emrich created illustrations for a number of popular magazines, including Everybody's, Harper's, People's Home Journal, and Woman's Home Companion. He was also a fine artist and won a figure composition award (and a $200 prize) at the Hoosier Salon in 1928. He exhibited his work at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, and with the Woodstock Artists Association. By the early 1940s, Emrich had returned to his hometown and was president of the Emrich Furniture Company on the west side of Indianapolis. He died in March 1972 at age eighty-seven.

"Noon" by Harvey Emrich, ca. 1928. I have seen another version of this painting in which the image is flipped. That one doesn't quite read right, so I have used this version instead.

An illustration by Emrich for All That Matters by Edgar A. Guest (1922), a book that included other illustrations by W.T. Benda, M.L. Bower, F.X. Leyendecker, Frederick Coffay Yohn, Robert E. Johnston, and Pruett Carter. Yohn was a fellow Hoosier, known for his battle scenes and historical paintings. Horses would appear to be an Emrich specialty.

A still-life painting by Harvey Emrich.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Paul Alexander (b. 1937)

Paul R. Alexander was one of the top science fiction paperback cover artists of the 1970s and '80s. Now retired, Mr. Alexander was born on September 3, 1937, in Richmond, Indiana, and graduated from Wittenberg University in nearby Springfield, Ohio, in 1967. He also studied at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. In his book Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art (1997), Vincent Di Fate includes Mr. Alexander with Dean Ellis, Christopher Foss, and John C. Berkey as "gadget" artists, "adept at painting futuristic hardware." The artist's talents were not limited to enormous spaceships zooming through vast realms of space, though. As the images below show, Mr. Alexander was equally adept at portraying human and not-so-human figures.

Paul Alexander's work was recently on display at the Communication Arts Technologies (CAT) Gallery at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. Those works were part of an exhibit called "Worlds Collide: The Art of Science Fiction." You can view an online gallery at:

http://www.montgomerycollege.edu/~mvaughan/technical_center/index.html

Cover illustration for Robert Silverberg's Those Who Watch (1978).

Another cover for another Robert Silverberg book, To Open the Sky (1978).

Finally, a cover illustration for Jehad by Simon Hawke, aka Nicholas Valentin Yermakov (1984).

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley