Jessie Willcox Smith  (1863-1935)
Back to School Again, c. 1928
Cover illustration for Good Housekeeping (October 1928)
watercolor and charcoal on paper
Delaware Art Museum, Louisa du Pont Copeland Memorial Fund, 1971-7

With the celebration of Labor Day this past Monday, summer officially ended. That last holiday of the summer season also marks the return to school for those children who have not already returned to their desks and studies, as we can see in Jessie Willcox Smith’s cover illustration for the October 1928 issue of Good Housekeeping. Indeed this sort of image would have been universally understood all over the United States because by 1918 every state required all American children to at least complete elementary school.

Smith stumbled into art illustration after finding the job of kindergarten teacher did not suit her. Subsequently she studied at The School of Design for Women in Philadelphia (now Moore College of Art and Design) and then moved on to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her first published illustration was in the May 1888 issue of St. Nicholas magazine. She was then hired to work on the advertising staff of the Ladies’ Home Journal. In 1894 Smith chose to continue her studies specializing in illustration with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia.

Smith’s experience with little children served her well in her illustrations. In Back to School Again, Smith skillfully rendered the wistful daydreams of a child trapped behind a school desk while the world, exemplified by the map behind her head, rolls on outside the classroom. The glowering child leans her head on her hands, her elbows rest on an open book. Under the book to her left side is a personal sized chalk board. The desk itself is cover with green baize, a coarse woolen or cotton fabric napped to imitate felt, and used to help deaden the noise in a ‘live’ space.*  On the desk in front of the student is a pencil box for storing pens, pencils, and erasers belonging to the student and a bottle of ink with a pen leaning in the open top. The map of North American behind the student shows the southern tier–from North Carolina on the upper right to Mexico at the far left. Except for Texas and Mexico, the other states are unnamed in the original illustration for the cover. It is interesting to note that in the printed cover that the name Texas is faded out and replaced with the magazine issue’s date. The unidentified upper region of the in the original is overlaid with the magazine’s masthead, date, and price. Notice how the publisher also added a star in a circle in the center of the G of Good Housekeeping. It is not exactly accurate, but appears to have been meant to indicate Santa Fe, the state capitol of New Mexico.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this illustration, but I would like to think that Jessie Willcox Smith was also making a reference to a popular little poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) in this image.

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

Longfellow might have written this out of his own experiences as an ordinary  schoolmaster in Maine from 1829 through 1833. According to Longfellow’s son Ernest, “It was while walking up and down with his second daughter, then a baby in his arms, that my father composed and sang to her the well-known lines.” **

Good Housekeeping magazine was founded in 1885 in Holyoke, Massachusetts and by 1911, when it was bought by the Hearst Corporation, it had a circulation of 300,000 readers. From December 1917 through March 1933 Jessie Willcox Smith created the monthly covers for the magazine.

*Baize has also been used on gaming (billiard, pool, and casino games) tables. At one time it would have also been tacked to the door separating the main house from the servant’s work rooms and living spaces in an effort to deaden the noise between the two sides of a house.

**Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow, Random Memories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922): 15. E. W. L. was an artist.

September 9, 2010

By Joyce K. Schiller, Curator, Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies
Norman Rockwell Museum

Clara Miller Burd (1873-1933)
‘Summer fun at the seaside’
Cover illustration for The Modern Priscilla (August 1922)

Summer may be nearly over, but there is still time to enjoy playing in the waves at the beach before we head home from our summer vacations and back to school or work. That is clearly the message Clara M. Burd conveyed in her August 1922 cover illustration for the magazine Modern Priscilla. Burd chose to explore children’s summer fun in the water by depicting three young bathing beauties—all appear to be images of young girls despite the various bathing costumes they wear—at play in the sea.

Modern Priscilla was a home, garden, and needlecraft magazine published from 1887 to1930 and meant as a how-to magazine for middle class American homemakers. Burd’s cover illustration for this end of summer issue of the magazine, should remind us that until after the second world war, most people found places and activities to help keep them cool during the heat of the summer.*  For example, in the third story in the Bobbsey Twins series of books about the middle-class Bobbsey family with two sets of fraternal twins (the first book was published in 1904 produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate), The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore (1907) takes the family to the seashore and describes the second half of the summer adventures told in the second book, The Bobbsey Twins in the Country (1907). The seashore portion of the story describes the family’s August month-long residence at their seashore home, called Ocean Cliff. During their first visit to the ocean that summer, little Flossie Bobbsey commented about the frightening aspect of the big waves, but “. . . when they “broke” on the sands they were only little splashy puddles for babies to wash their pink toes in.”**

Clara Burd’s illustration of children playing in the sea was constructed of a mixture of watercolor and gouache (a thicker, more opaque version of watercolor.) Burd used the application of gouache very selectively especially in the foamy water that splashes up on the children. Because Burd painted white highlights on the children’s arms and legs, we interpret them as being fully wet from their play in the water. Since we cannot see what the thick rope line is attached to in this illustration, we can only assume that it was placed there as a safety device for the children. In the late 18^th and 19^th century men and women usually bathed in the sea in segregated groups, entering and exiting the water in bathing machines.  After the turn of the century sea bathing was beginning to enjoy wide acceptance and the use of bathing machines was in steep decline.  By the 1920s people everywhere were more popularly enjoying bathing in the sea.

Clara Miller Burd was raised on Long Island and trained in New York at the Chase School and then at the National Academy of Design. In 1898 she also studied in Paris. After her return to New York in 1900 she studied stained glass design at Tiffany Studios and worked as a stain glass artist.  In the teens she also began creating illustrations for children’s books. Eventually her work extended to designing magazine covers for magazines as Woman’s Home Companion, Woman’s World, Literary Digest, Farmer’s Wife, and Canadian Home-Journal.

* See the previous entry in Exploring Illustration for the reference to air conditioning.

**http://books.google.com/books?id=dNcDAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22The+Bobbsey+Twins+at+the+Seashore%22&source=bl&ots=W348wANyG9&sig=_WDnZGSIWTseikvBULVejcp5fCw&hl=en&ei=lLtzTMrkLsO88gba4tHxCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false

August 26, 2010

By Joyce K. Schiller, Curator, The Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies
Norman Rockwell Museum