Leota Woy (1867-1962)

Leota Woy was born on July 3, 1867, in New Castle, Indiana, and was in Colorado by 1888, where she attended the University of Colorado. In 1920 she moved to Los Angeles. Leota Woy seems to have devoted herself to the design of bookplates, postcards, and crests. I don't know of any other illustration credits for her, although she also worked in stained glass, embroidery, and needlework. She was a member of art clubs in Denver and southern California. Leota Woy died on January 23, 1962, in Glendale, California, at age ninety-four.

Leota Woy was most well known for her bookplates. This one was for the actor John Gilbert.

Here is a bookplate for Walter Sigfrid Olson. Note the vertical signature on the lower right.

During the picture postcard craze of the early 1900s, Leota Woy was a postcard designer. Her frog series from about 1910 was very popular.

Leota signed some of her designs with her initials encircling her copyright notice.

Leota also created a popular Valentine series of cards. This may have been one of the cards in that series.

This looks like a card from the same series.

Leota's design for a card of the Colorado columbine and the Denver Auditorium Building shows a completely different approach. 

Merry Christmas from

Indiana Illustrators & Hoosier Cartoonists!

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Florence G. Parsell (1891-1978)

Florence Gertrude Parsell was born on August 29, 1891, in Angola, Indiana. She illustrated her high school yearbook, The Spectator, and was a class historian, musician, and writer. Florence graduated from Angola High School in 1909 and from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1918 in an academic program. She was an art teacher in Angola and in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for many years (as early as 1910 and as late as 1943). The website AskArt and others call her Florence Abbey Parsell. I don't know where that name comes from or whether it is correct. In 1951, Florence married Jesse Orweiler Covell of Angola, and they resided on his farm until his death in 1957. Florence Parsell Covell survived him by more than two decades and died on September 14, 1978, in Angola. She was buried at Circle Hill Cemetery in the city of her birth.

Art teacher, painter, and illustrator Florence G. Parsell in her natural environment, a high school classroom in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1943.

I wonder if Florence's students of 1943 knew that she once looked like this: from a school program at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1917. (Photograph from the Chicago Tribune.)

And only a few years before, she was prim and proper, although that last part--"We have also found her a very delightful entertainer"--may have meant more than meets the eye. (Photograph from the Angola High School Spectator, 1909.)

An example of Florence Parsell's artwork, from The Spectator (1907), and just right for a Christmas season of 106 years later.

Revised and updated on December 6, 2019.
Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Frank Snapp (1876-1927)

Son of a blacksmith, Frank Snapp was born on March 19, 1876, in Princeton, Indiana. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and worked in Detroit, New York City, and Chicago as an illustrator of books, newspapers, and magazines. His illustrations were published in "Yours Truly" and One Hundred Other Original Drawings (Judge, 1908), The Long Arm of Mannister by E. Phillips Oppenheim (1908), Seven Keys to Baldpate by Earl Derr Biggers (1913), and other novels throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Some if not all of those were reprints from magazine and newspaper serials. Frank Snapp was a member of the Society of Illustrators from 1910 onward and was employed by the Charles Everett Johnson Studio for many years. His coworkers there included McClelland Barclay (1891-1942), Andrew Loomis (1892-1959), Harry Timmins (1887-1963), and a young Haddon Sundblom (1899-1976), who went on to fame by painting images of Santa Claus for Coca-Cola. Frank Snapp died on March 12, 1927, a week before his fifty-first birthday, and was buried in his hometown.

Indiana artist Frank Snapp worked during the Golden Age of Illustration in America when images like this one appeared weekly in newspapers and magazines. The illustration is for Maude Radford Warren's story "The Man Who Was Lost." It was printed more than a century ago, before the Great War, which abounded in images of men in military dress and women in candy-striped nurse's outfits.  

Here's a Frank Snapp illustration from an unknown source, dated 1908. The figures are a little stiff and conventional, a far cry from . . . 

This image from The Brute by Frederic Arnold Kummer (1912), dated just two years later (note "1910" in the upper right corner). The difference? The second image was obviously drawn from life, whereas the first may have been a work mostly of the imagination. Snapp won awards for his watercolors, a technique on full display here if only in black and white.  

Here is an undated watercolor or gouache painting, in color but curiously lacking in vibrancy.

I'll close with a far more colorful and accomplished work repeating the motif of the red parasol and the woman in the garden. Both are undated.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from

Indiana Illustrators and Hoosier Cartoonists!

Art by Franklin Booth

Charles E. Bauerle (1912-1952)

Charles E. Bauerle was born on March 17, 1912, in North Vernon, Indiana, into a growing family that eventually numbered at least nine children. The Bauerle family made its home on the south side of Indianapolis. I don't know much about Charles Bauerle, but in 1938-1939, at age twenty-six, he completed a series of murals on nautical subjects at the new Indianapolis Naval Armory (now Heslar Naval Armory). The armory was constructed under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and it was for that agency that Bauerle worked, at least for a time. His murals, which are still in existence (see comment below), show the Bonhomme Richard in action during the Revolutionary War, the victory of the Lawrence and the Niagara over the British fleet in the War of 1812 (commemorated in a U.S. postage stamp in 2013), the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War, and the arrival of American destroyers at Queenstown, Ireland, in May 1917, near the outset of the American entry into World War I. Each of the murals is twelve by fifteen feet.

In about 1950, Charles Bauerle (whose name has been misspelled as "Bauerley") moved to rural Brown County. He worked as an artist for naval ordinance, presumably at what is now Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center in Martin and adjoining counties, located well west of Brown County. On the evening of October 17, 1952, while fetching the mail, Bauerle was struck by a truck on State Highway 135 (see comment below). He died from his injuries and was buried at Greenwood Cemetery, Greenwood, Indiana.

On the left, a photograph of a mural by Charles E. Bauerle, taken at the Indianapolis Naval Armory in 1938-1939. The mural shows the arrival of American destroyers at Queenstown, Ireland, in May 1917. On the right, a photograph of the artist, who would have been five years old when that event took place and who was not even thirty when he completed the mural. From the Indianapolis Times, Jan. 7, 1939.

A recent photograph of the same mural, still on display at Heslar Naval Armory, Indianapolis, from the website of Indiana Landmarks, which has an article about the armory, its history, and its planned use at this link.

Updated May 6, 2019. Thanks to the commenters below for further information.
Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Charles E. Barnes (1915-2005)

The men who conquered Fortress Europe and who stormed the beaches of the South Pacific--the men who survived the war and the sixty-eight years since--are in their waning years. We as a nation have honored them with a memorial in Washington, D.C. Our current commander-in-chief has dishonored them by attempting to keep them out, as if a few moveable barriers and a few yards of plastic tape could discourage men who long ago laid waste to world-spanning totalitarian regimes. In support of our veterans, I will write two postings this month, both on artists who drew and painted pictures of military action.

First, Charles E. Barnes, a Brown County artist born three years and a day before the first Armistice Day. Barnes was born in Chicago on November 10, 1915. The 1920 census found him with his family in Chicago. In 1930 and 1940, they were living in Richmond, Indiana. Barnes relocated to Indianapolis, perhaps sometime in the early 1940s. He taught at the Park School (now Park Tudor) in Indianapolis and kept a studio on McLean Place in the city. When war came, he answered his country's call.

In July 1945, after the war in Europe had ended, the Indianapolis Star published three drawings that PFC Charles E. Barnes had made at Monte Cassino the year before. Fighting had raged there throughout early 1944. The Allies bombed the abbey at Monte Cassino in February. One of Barnes' drawings is dated 1944. The other is undated. It's clear, though, that he was there shortly after the Germans finally withdrew in May. In the articles, Barnes was described as "a veteran of the North African and Italian campaigns." He in fact spent four years with the 704th Engineers as a camouflage technician not only in North Africa and Italy but also in Sicily and France.

Charles E. Barnes studied at the Herron School of Art, the Santa Monica School of Design, and the School of Modern Photography. Francis Chapin (1899-1965) was among his instructors. One of his classmates at Herron was also his friend, cartoonist Dick Wingert (1919-1993). In his fine art, executed before and after the war, Barnes was an abstract painter. More than fifty universities and museums, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, held or hold his works. Barnes was art director at Argo Films in New York City and a charter member of the Creative Film Society in Hollywood. For many years he operated the Modern Art Center, later the Charles E. Barnes Art Center, located across from the north entrance to Brown County State Park in Nashville, Indiana. Brown County is renowned for its fall color, its art colony, and of course as home to Kin Hubbard's wry observer of human folly, Abe Martin.

Barnes had a stroke in his mid sixties. Though paralyzed on his left side and halting in his speech, he continued to create works of art every day. "Well, sure, I have to," he said. Charles Barnes died on March 31, 2005. He was eighty-nine years old.

Drawings made by PFC Charles E. Barnes at Monte Cassino, Italy, 1944, and published in 1945. From the Indianapolis Star, July 15 and 29, 1945.

Indiana artist Charles E. Barnes (1915-2005). From the Indianapolis Star, Oct. 9, 1969.

Updated on July 17, 2020.
Text and captions copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Slug Signorino and "The Straight Dope"

"The Straight Dope," a question-and-answer column written by the rare and elusive Cecil Adams, has appeared in the Chicago Reader since 1973 and in syndication for some time since then. This year marks forty years of fighting ignorance by Mr. Adams, the world's smartest human. In that time, "The Straight Dope" has had but one illustrator, the equally elusive though less fictional Slug Signorino. Mr. Signorino is a Hoosier and lives in La Porte, Indiana. I believe I know his approximate year of birth and his real first name, but those facts are not really the point of my writing today. Instead I would like to direct readers to the website of "The Straight Dope" and the question of the day concerning television-watching habits of middle Americans. Robert Clark, subject of my posting from earlier today, thought enough of his home state to rename himself Robert Indiana. Cecil Adams seems to be less enamored of neighboring Indiana, for the last sentence of his current column reads:

If asked what's most likely to cause brain damage: daylight savings time, watching TV, or living in Indiana, I ain't going with DST.

I'll take that as a swipe at my home state and assume it's all in good fun. After all, Cecil Adams' illustrator lives in Indiana and he obviously does not exhibit any signs of brain damage.

Link:

Slug Signorino Studio

Text copyright 2013, 2024 Terence E. Hanley