A Christmas Tribute To Thomas Nast

In my last posting I mentioned how I developed a technique of drawing with felt-tip markers, creating "nubby" lines that have an antique look. As part of the same campaign, John Atkinson and I promoted the shopping center with a Santa Claus modeled after Thomas Nast's famous image. In my illustration, Santa is holding products that could be found at the shopping center.

click to enlarge   |   © Mark D. Ruffner, 1983

Here is my illustration, and below is the 1862 original. I didn't want to lose that distinctive 18th-century clay pipe!

billcasselman.com

While Thomas Nast (1840-1902) defined the American perception of Santa Claus for decades, he is better remembered as the finest 19th-century American political cartoonist. He is the man who came up with the iconic elephant to represent the Republican party, and while he didn't create the donkey as a Democratic emblem, he popularized it.

click to enlarge   |   artintheage.com

Nast began newspaper work while still a teenager, and worked for both Frank Leslie's Illustrated and Harper's Weekly. He used photographs as reference for his stinging caricatures, and was instrumental in bringing down the powerful New York politician, Boss Tweed. When Boss Tweed fled the country on corruption charges and was apprehended in Spain, it was a Thomas Nast cartoon that identified him. Nast's cartoons are also credited with helping Grover Cleveland become the first Democratic President (in 1884) since the 1856 election.

In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt rewarded the ailing Thomas Nast by appointing him as Consul General to Ecuador. There Nast contracted Yellow Fever while helping others to escape a similar fate, and died the same year.

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Fun Crosshatching

When I was an aspiring artist, barely in high school, I started making files of images that caught my attention, mostly for their style. My own talents were unformed, so I looked to others for inspiration.

One of my first clippings, in 1963, was this British depiction of a miserly Uncle Sam. (When this Punch cartoon was drawn, the U.S. and Britain were settling claims that had arisen during the Civil War.) As a kid, I was intrigued by crosshatching, and how depth and volume could be achieved with it. When I clipped this, my own attempts at crosshatching were disappointing!

An illustrator whose drawings excited me was Alan E. Cober, who worked through Push Pin Studio. His illustrations ran in magazines like McCall's at a time when the other illustrations were quite staid by comparison.

Cober created rich textures by overlapping images, crosshatching in color, and making shadows with areas of parallel lines that are known simply as "hatching." All these Cober illustrations are details of larger illustrations, now starting to discolor and fray.

The illustrator Einsel created wonderful textures with a jagged line, and in the hair above, the illusion of crosshatching — lines that don't actually cross but look like neat crosshatching.

Another popular artist of the early 1960s was the caricaturist David Levine, shown in this self-portrait. His rich satire follows the tradition of great cartoonists like the American Thomas Nast and the English Sir John Tenniel.

Here's a delightful crosshatched illustration — I wish I knew the artist. Every time I see crosshatching that looks like a series of exclamation points on their side ...

... I know the artist has been studying bank note engravings, like the one below.

The Art of the Market   |   Tamararkin and Krantz   |   1999

Possibly the greatest American bank note engraver, and by default the greatest crosshatcher, was Asher B. Durand, whom I discussed in an earlier posting, here.

In my files I even started keeping textures that approximated crosshatching. Look, there's Mr Einsel's jagged line!

Mark D. Ruffner  © 2011

Here's one of my own illustrations, an Elizabethan unicorn. The original of this illustration was done on a sheet of 8½ x 11 bond paper, not much bigger than how you're probably viewing it right now.
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