Elizabeth Buchsbaum Newhall (1909-1942)-Part One

Teacher and illustrator Elizabeth Buchsbaum Newhall came from a distinguished family of scientists and artists. Sadly, her mother died when she was only an infant, and Elizabeth herself lived only a very short life. In creating the illustrations for a textbook still considered a standard in its field, Elizabeth Buchsbaum combined the two sides of her family, the scientific and the artistic. Although she was also a fine artist, her reputation now rests on her drawings of insects, worms, and other invertebrates.

Elizabeth Mabel Buchsbaum was born in 1909 in the Philippines. Her father, then a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army, was Dr. Maurice (Morris) Buchsbaum (1867-1935), a native of Austria who had arrived in the United States in 1890 and who had been naturalized on October 1, 1896. Dr. Buchsbaum received his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1903 and his medical degree from Rush Medical College of Chicago in 1905. He also taught internal medicine at that school. Dr. Buchsbaum joined the Medical Reserve Corps on September 25, 1908, in Oklahoma. After being stationed in Wyoming, Dr. Buchsbaum was transferred to Fort Mills on the Philippine island of Corregidor. He began at that post on October 30, 1909, as an assistant to the surgeon and was later stationed on the island of Mindanao and at the Presidio in San Francisco.

Elizabeth Buchsbaum's mother was Mabel Victor Buchsbaum about whom almost nothing is known, despite the fact that she lies buried in a national cemetery. Mabel Buchsbaum passed away on November 25, 1909, and was first laid to rest in the Philippines. Her body was reinterred at San Francisco National Cemetery, located at the Presidio, on April 1, 1910. Considering the circumstances of Elizabeth Buchsbaum Newhall's death in 1942 and the fact that her birth year is estimated in census records as 1910 rather than 1909, I think it possible that Mabel Buchsbaum died in childbirth. In any case, her daughter would have been only an infant at her death. Her son Ralph, born on January 2, 1907, in Chickasha, Oklahoma Territory, was not even three years old at her death.

Elizabeth Buchsbaum's widowed father was honorably discharged from the U.S Army on January 15, 1912. Less than a month later, on February 10, 1912, he married Hermine Josephine Beck in Chicago. Born in Bohemia in about 1877, she came to the United States in 1893. As of the 1910 U.S. Census, she was the superintendent of a hospital on Wrightwood Avenue in Chicago. In short order after the Buchsbaums' wedding, a second son, named Robert E. Buchsbaum, came into the family. He was born on December 25, 1912, in Chicago.

By 1918, the Buchsbaums were living in Gary, Indiana. Incorporated in 1906, Gary was then only a dozen years old and like the rest of the lake region of northwestern Indiana served as a bedroom community for people studying and working in Chicago. I presume that Elizabeth attended school in Gary, as her family had lived there from as early as 1918 and as late as the census of 1930, when she would have been twenty years old. According to the website American Illustration Notables, Circa 1900-1970, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. She also attended the University of Chicago. By 1935, Elizabeth was a teacher at Jefferson School in Gary. In 1939, she was at Edison School in the same city. Gary is no longer what it once was. Unfortunately, Jefferson and Edison schools have both fallen into neglect and decay.

Sometime around 1939-1941, Elizabeth M. Buchsbaum married Franklin Newhall (1914-2005), an agricultural climatologist specializing in soil moisture. Afterwards known as Elizabeth Buchsbaum Newhall, she died, supposedly in childbirth, on the night of December 30, 1942, in Chicago. Although her death was reported in The Jewish Post, her remains were interred at the First Unitarian Church crypt in Chicago. She was survived by her husband, stepmother, and her two brothers. Her husband went on to marry two more times and to live into his tenth decade on earth.

To be continued . . .

Dr. Maurice (Morris) Buchsbaum (1867-1935), father of teacher and illustrator Elizabeth Buchsbaum Newhall. The photograph is from his graduation from Rush Medical College in Chicago, 1905.

Jefferson School, Gary, Indiana, where Elizabeth taught during the 1930s.

Updated December 5, 2018.
Thanks to Sherry Buchsbaum for corrections and for further information on the Buchsbaum family. (See her comment below.)
Text copyright 2016, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Elizabeth Buchsbaum Newhall (1909-1942)-Part Two

Elizabeth Buchsbaum provided the illustrations for the biology textbook Animals Without Backbones: An Introduction to the Invertebrata, published in 1938. The authors were her older brother, Ralph Morris Buchsbaum (1907-2002), and Ralph's wife, Mildred Shaffer Buchsbaum (1912-1996). Elizabeth's drawings are in black and white and are characterized by great clarity and simplicity. Generations of biology students have studied and learned from her work. Apparently, one of the great graphic artists of the twentieth century was also a student of Elizabeth Buchsbaum. I'll let the artists themselves tell the story . . .

Here is the cover for the second edition of Animals Without Backbones, written by Ralph M. Buchsbaum and Mildred Shaffer Buchsbaum and illustrated by Ralph's sister Elizabeth M. Buchsbaum. The crosseyed planarian has become a standard image in biological illustration. It's one I remember from my own childhood reading.

Here is an interior illustration from the book, showing a colonial animal called an Obelia. Note the great clarity and simplicity of the drawing. (I have slightly altered the image by recoloring the background to an even tan color.)

Elizabeth Buchsbaum's depiction of planarian anatomy is also clear and readable. (Again I have recolored the background.)

According to undocumented sources on the Internet, Dutch artist M.C. Escher (1898-1972) is supposed to have been inspired by the drawings of Elizabeth Buchsbaum. Is there truth in that claim? I don't know. There isn't any doubt that Escher's flatworms look a lot like Elizabeth Buchsbaums' flatworms, but then both are based on real animals. Update (Dec. 5, 2018): According to Sherry Buchsbaum, granddaughter-in-law of Maurice and Mabel Buchsbaum, M.C. Escher was indeed influenced by Elizabeth Buchsbaum's depiction of planaria. See her comment below.

Here is Elizabeth's grasshopper from Animals Without Backbones . . .

And here is Escher's. I think a stronger case can be made that Escher was inspired by Elizabeth's grasshopper, depicted in both drawings in an almost orthographic projection. (Oddly, grasshoppers are in the order Orthoptera.) But if Escher was influenced by one drawing, why not by the other? And if that's the case, then an Indiana illustrator has her place in the study of one of the most renowned artists of the twentieth century. Either way, the art of Elizabeth Buchsbaum Newhall lives on, even now, seventy-four years after her death. Update (Dec. 5, 2018): In her comment below, Sherry Buchsbaum has pointed out that M.C. Escher's grasshopper came before Elizabeth Buchsbaum's. With that being the case, I wonder whether she was instead influenced by him.

To close out this article about Elizabeth Buchsbaum, I would like to mention her younger brother, Robert E. Buchsbaum. He was born on December 25, 1912, in Chicago and received his bachelor's (1936) and master's (1937) degrees from the University of Chicago. Buchsbaum was a conductor (of the Gary symphony and others), an oboist, an instructor of music, and an executive at Coronet Recording Company. After a very long and productive life, he died on January 31, 2001, in Columbus, Ohio.

Text copyright 2016, 2024 Terence E. Hanley