Sarah Wyman Whitman, Artist & Designer

Descended from prominent New England families, Sarah Wyman spent her early childhood in Baltimore among her Wyman relatives, in a cultivated and philanthropic environment. When she returned to Lowell, Massachusetts, at 11, she was educated at home by a gifted tutor, who shaped her lifelong dedication to learning.

After her marriage to successful Boston wool merchant, Henry Whitman, their move to Beacon Hill, afforded Sarah access to the wider world of the Boston elite: artists, writers, and educators. In 1868, she entered the studio of the successful, socially prominent  artist William Morris Hunt, who had only recently begun to welcome women as students.

Whitman's professional training was astonishingly brief. She studied with Hunt for three winters, studied drawing with his colleague William Rimmer, and twice—in 1877 and late 1878 or early 1879—went to France to study with Hunt’s former master, Thomas Couture. Although she lacked “just one year in the Academy,” considered a prerequisite for a successful career, she determined to move forward. In a letter to a patron, she described her “plan of life” as balancing a successful professional career amidst her obligations “as a householder,” her philanthropic interests, and her position in society. Even she admitted it was a “strange complex web” of a life.

By 1881, one critic already judged Whitman “as representative of successful women-painters in Boston.” She did not limit herself to accepted feminine subjects: portraiture, still lifes, and landscapes. She turned to the field of design, an approach—encouraged by Couture, echoed in the English Arts and Crafts Movement, and actively supported by her mentor and benefactor, Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton—that viewed art and life as inseparable.

Sarah Wyman Whitman Watercolor, "Niagara Falls," 1898

In the 1880s Whitman began to produce a steady stream of designs for book covers, stained glass, and interiors and became the first professional woman artist regularly employed by Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin to give their mass-produced book covers a sense of simple elegance through line, color, and lettering. Responsible for a significant number of Houghton and Mifflin covers throughout the 1880s-90s, Whitman forged a new approach to book cover design using simple yet elegant forms, carefully chosen cloths and a distinctive lettering style. Her spare and elegant book designs, possibly in reaction to the rather “overwrought” covers - including the Eastlake style covers - that were the norm in the 1870s and 1880s, are important manifestations of the Art Nouveau style in America.

Examples of “overwrought” covers of the 1870s and ‘80s

“The typical book offered by the large American publishers of the mid-1880s sported a cover of moisture-resistant colored cloth, with a design die-stamped on it in black or gold.
That design, generally concocted by the die-maker himself, might be a riot of type faces,

borders, arabesques, and Japanese or Eastlake-style motifs.

It might reproduce an illustration from inside the book.

Or it might feature an incongruous vignette unrelated to the subject matter

– perhaps a volume of critical essays with a bunch of daisies thrown across the cover,’

as designer Alice C. Morse later commented dryly.

One thing you could count on, however: whatever the ornament, there was likely to be a lot of it.

That is, until Sarah Wyman Whitman came along.”

O’Donnell, Anne Stewart, “Telling Books by Their Covers,” Style 1900, Summer 2008.

Before the Curfew and Other Poems Chiefly Occasional, by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1883.

Whitman reduced book decoration to the essential. Although she designed "special" editions in vellum with gold stamping, the majority of her work for the mass market employed two colors of cloth and a single color of ink for stamping. The production costs for Whitman's book covers were probably quite low when weighed against their effectiveness as advertising tools. In her “Notes of an Informal Talk on Book Illustration”, given before the Boston Art Students Association, Feb. 14, 1895, Whitman wrote: "…You have got to think how to apply elements of design to these cheaply sold books; to put the touch of art on this thing that is going to be produced at a level price, which allows for no handwork, the decoration to be cut with a die, the books to be put out by the thousand and to be sold at a low price…"

Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney's Stories, by Mrs. A.D. T. Whitney.  Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1893.

Many authors were her friends, including Sarah Orne Jewett, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Correspondence between Whitman and publishers testifies to her involvement in the entire process of bringing a design to the public, as well as to her desire to faithfully represent the author's vision.


The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1897

In 20 years, Whitman designed well over 200 books, frequently incorporating her design signature, a “flaming heart.”

Through her artistry and success, Sarah Wyman Whitman inspired many young women to enter the field of book design. Now, more than 130 years later, her work is still considered as unique and style-setting. Click here to view the notable, extensive Boston Public Library’s Sarah Wyman Whitman collection.

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Whitman’s home in Boston's Beacon Hill was a salon for writers and artists, many of whom were her good friends. Her paintings can be found in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and her stained glass windows in Boston's Trinity Church and Parish House, New York's Grace Church, the Berwick Academy in Maine (Sarah Orne Jewett’s alma mater), and many smaller commissions for churches stretching from New York City to Albany, and along the New England coast from the North Shore to Cranberry Island, Maine. For Harvard’s Memorial Hall she designed both the elaborate south transept window and the Honor and Peace window on the south side of what is now Annenberg Hall. Fittingly, Whitman’s last works in glass—the panels Courage, Love, and Patience created for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition—are now installed in the Radcliffe College Room of the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library.

"Honor and Peace" Window
Annenberg Hall, Harvard University
Funded by the Class of 1865
"This window commemorates those who surrendered their lives in the War of the Rebellion.”

Whitman taught women’s Bible classes for 30 years, in winter at Trinity Church, in summer on the North Shore of Boston. She was a founder of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts; a benefactor of Radcliffe College, Howard University, Berea College, and Tuskegee Institute; and a generous patron of the arts.


An Island Garden, by Celia Thaxter. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895.

Although her last years were marred by illness, the result of overwork, she continued to create at a lessened pace. Her death in 1904 was deeply mourned…as William James wrote to his brother, Henry: “She leaves a dreadful vacuum in Boston…and the same world is here—but without her to bear witness.”

The Ramblers Lease, by Bradford Torrey. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1890

A Lovely Time, Not Very Long Ago...Thank You, Eloise Wilkin!

During her 50 year career spanning the decades of the 1930s through the 1980s, Eloise Wilkin illustrated over 110 books for children.  Her illustrations evoke an idyllic rural world not unlike that which she knew while raising her family of four children in upstate New York.  Famous for her instantly recognizable style: sweet, cherubic, chubby-faced children; detailed early American and Victorian style architecture and furnishings; and the verdant, daisy-strewn hills of upstate New York, Eloise illustrated children’s early reading books; paper dolls; puzzles; entries in the Childcraft series; 20 books authored by her sister, Esther; as well as her 47 popular “Little Golden Books” titles.  Her most beloved titles include We Help Daddy, We Help Mommy, Baby Dear, So Big!, Prayers for Children, Busy Timmy, and My Little Golden Book About God.

In addition to free lance drawing and book illustration, in the early 1960s Eloise successfully designed and marketed, via the Vogue Doll Company, a new-born infant doll about which the popular Little Golden Book, Baby Dear, was later written. Eloise's daughter, Deborah and grandson, David served as the models for the mother and baby in the book. The realistic style of the Baby Dear doll revolutionized the doll industry at the time, encouraging more realistic baby dolls. Reportedly, former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev returned home with several of the dolls after a trip to F.A.O. Schwartz in New York City.

Born in Rochester, New York in 1904, Eloise Burns, was fortunate to have had a mother who encouraged her imaginative children to enjoy their creative gifts, allowing them to draw all over one wall in their house just before redecorating. Her father was a newspaperman and her mother had studied piano at a conservatory and often played classical music, which Eloise grew to love. Eloise, her sister Esther (only fifteen months older), a brother Robert, and two other siblings grew up in New York City on 109th Street near Central Park. As children, Eloise and Esther shared a bedroom and spent hours creating doll houses from orange crates, dolls out of newspapers, and sewing doll clothes. Eloise and Esther, remained especially close, and eventually married brothers, Sydney and George Wilkin. At age 11, Eloise won a drawing contest for children, sponsored by the Wanamaker department stores, with a picture of a pilgrim returning home.

While studying art at Mechanics Institute (now Rochester Institute of Technology), Eloise Burns met Joan Esley, best known as an illustrator of several books for adolescents. They formed a lifelong friendship that included collaboration on a children’s book entitled, The Visit. After graduating from The Rochester Institute of Technology, Eloise and Joan began doing free lance work in Rochester (i.e., Eloise painting stations of the cross for the Sacred Heart Academy Church and illustrations for the Rochester Box Company) and ultimately moved together to New York City, where they hoped to have a better chance at careers in illustration. Eloise’s first book was The Shining Hour for the Century Co. Other publishers for  which she illustrated were Ginn, Scribner, Little Brown, Rand McNally, Random House and MacMillian. Many early illustrations were for school books, i.e., The First Grade Book for Ginn. Early in her career Eloise illustrated paper dolls for Samuel Gabriel & Sons, Playtime House and Jaymar. She illustrated for four years before marrying Sidney Wilkin in 1935, thus, her early works are signed Eloise Burns.

The Wilkins family settled in a fieldstone farmhouse with eight fireplaces in the country near Canandaigua in upstate New York, and Eloise slowed her career for several years while raising her four children, Ann, Sidney, Jr., Deborah and Jeremy. In 1943, she was offered a contract with Simon & Schuster and worked almost exclusively for Little Golden Books, illustrating the 47 little golden books, calendars, shape books, big golden books, and sturdy golden books until 1961; then, only occasionally illustrating for them up until the mid-eighties. Eloise used her neighborhood, her home, her children, her husband, her grandchildren, and their friends and neighbors as models for her illustrations. Many little golden book pages became puzzles which were produced by Simon & Schuster and later Golden Press. Earlier puzzles illustrated by Wilkin have been found produced by Playtime House and Leo Hart Co. Her illustrations are also found on record sleeves of many little golden records (occasionally on the record label itself) and on china plates, ads, Hallmark cards and in Child's Life, Story Parade and Golden Magazines. Currently, original editions of Eloise Wilkin illustrated books in very good condition can command prices of up to several hundred dollars.

It is said that Eloise was very modest about her talents and was a woman who stood up for her beliefs, whether it was refusing to paint pants on a mother in one of her children’s books, marching with Martin Luther King, marching with the Berrigans in Washington early in the Vietnam War, teaching art to inner city children, or assisting a University of Rochester student in the burning of his draft card in Central Park.

In October of 1987, Eloise died of cancer, at the age of 84 in Brighton, New York. At the time of her death, she was working on a new doll and was still illustrating.

In the recently published, A Little Golden Book Collection Eloise Wilkin Stories (featuring nine of her most treasured stories: "Busy Timmy, "Guess Who Lives Here", "Wonders of Nature", "Selections from A Child’s Garden of Verses", "We Help Mommy", "Baby Listens," "Baby Dear," and "Baby Looks"), an afterword by James Werner Watson aptly describes Eloise Wilkin’s legacy:

"A warm and creative homemaker, Eloise shared with the world glimpses of her big, busy, welcoming household, its rooms papered with gentle patterns, its drop-leaf tables and rocking chairs aglow with hand-rubbed sheen, its four-poster beds covered by hand-stitched quilts. A devoutly religious person, she shared ever so gently her values, her sense of the beauty of order and love, of implicit self-discipline, and of regard for others . . . she has left us, only slightly idealized, rich reminders of a lovely time not very long ago."

To listen to a three-part interview with one of Eloise Wilkin’s daughters, Deborah Wilkin Springett, (author of the Eloise Wilkin’s Book of Poems, her mother’s last illustrated book, published in 1988) and to order her biography about her mother, The Golden Years of Eloise Wilkin, go to: http://www.triviumpursuit.com/blog/2007/02/21/podcast-2-interview-with-eloise-wilkins-daughter-part-one/

Maud Lewis – Canadian Folk Artist

Rise above the storm and you will find the sunshine.

During a recent cruise to Halifax, I visited the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and was delighted to discover the charming works of Nova Scotia folk artist, Maud Lewis (1903-1970). Inspiration can certainly come from unlikely places and through unlikely people...

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. - Eleanor Roosevelt

Although disfigured and disabled as a result of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, impoverished, untrained, and married to an itinerant fish peddler, Everett Lewis, who "wasn't exactly Prince Charming,” Maud produced, during the last 30 years of her life, a torrent of sparkling, joyous, and uplifting paintings and cards. Her works - painted with old found brushes; a sardine tin palette; and marine, house, or cheap craft paints on found boards, cardboard, shells, stones, and household implements such as trays and dustpans – initially sold for as little as two dollars each. I was told by an antiquarian book dealer who I met in St. John, New Brunswick, that two Maud Lewis paintings sold at auction this summer in New Brunswick for several thousands of dollars each.

You can live without some things if you have something to live for.

Although she was not a formally trained artist, Maud's work demonstrates that she had a strong sense of composition and learned from close observation of any visual material that came her way -- postcards, calendars, greeting cards, etc. Her art has been said to reflect "an inner light that found joy in memories and imaginings of life."

No matter how tall the mountain it can not block out the sun...

Maud lived most of her life in poverty with her husband in a very small (4.1 x 3.8 meters) house near the Bay of Fundy with no indoor plumbing, running water, or electricity; sleeping in a small loft upstairs; and weathering the Marshalltown, Nova Scotia winters with only a woodstove. Because of Maud’s worsening rheumatoid arthritis, she was unable to do housework. Everett took care of the house, gardening and cooking; and Maud decorated every surface of the house, inside and out, and many of its contents with her bright and cheerful painting. The Maud-painted house, currently on display at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, shows that Maud's life, despite many limitations, was full of enjoyment through her art.

Let your hopes, not your hurts shape your future.

We find in life exactly what we put in it. - Emerson

Maud began her artistic career by hand-drawing Christmas cards. These proved popular with her husband's customers as he sold fish door to door and encouraged her to begin painting. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, tourists stopped by the little house - after seeing her roadside sign, "Paintings for sale" - to purchase her work, and found a quiet woman with a delightful smile. Her pleasure didn't come from the pride of having done a painting, but from the creative act itself and the enjoyment others seemed to derive from her work.

Obstacles are opportunities in disguise.

After Maud’s death in 1970 and, subsequently, Everett’s in 1979, the lovingly painted home began to deteriorate. In reaction, a group of concerned citizens from the Digby area started the Maud Lewis Painted House Society; their only goal - to save this valued landmark. After a number of years of fundraising, the society realized that the project was going to take more resources than they could gather. In 1984, the house was sold to the Province of Nova Scotia and turned over to the care of Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. In 1996, with funds from the federal Department of Canadian Heritage and from private individuals, the processes of conservation and restoration began. Thus, the final, fully restored house is on permanent display in Halifax at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.






Maud is the subject of a book, The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis, and a stage play has been written about her life. She is also the subject of a National Film Board of Canada documentary, Maud Lewis - A World without Shadows (1997). In the short film from the I Can Make Art Like... series, a group of Grade 6 students are inspired by Maud Lewis’ works to create a folk art painting of their own downtown neighborhood.




 
For more information and to purchase Maud Lewis prints, cards and T-shirts, see the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia website and be sure to view their interactive website about the moving and restoration of Maud’s little house, as well as the virtual tour.

Great people are ordinary people with extraordinary amounts of determination.

Smithsonian Jaunt I

One of the benefits of living a short Metro ride away from the Smithsonian Museums is the opportunity to spend winter weekdays “ far from the maddening crowds” in peaceful exploration of amazing treasures. This morning I visited the Freer and Sackler Galleries, which house the Smithsonian’s collection of Asian art, and enjoyed viewing the kinds of Asian objects d’art that inspired the 19th century Japonisme craze.



Section from Emperor Minghuang's Journey to Sichuan; Ming Dinasty (1368-1644) Chinese handscroll painting on silk

Who is Margaret Armstrong?

Margaret Armstrong, second left, in 1910 at the family's lake house in North Hatley, Quebec, Canada with friends & sister, Helen, far left, and brother, Hamilton, far right.

In previous postings (see below), I have referred to Margaret Armstrong. Margaret Nielson Armstrong (1867-1944) was the most productive and accomplished American book designer of the 1890s and early 1900s. Thematically and philosophically, her career places her squarely within the vibrant Arts and Crafts Movement in the United States. Her eclectic style - combining classical and art nouveau with its graceful symmetry and natural motifs, mainly floral in character, rooted in Japonisme and with Colonial, Native American and other motifs - resists easy characterization.

Margaret was the eldest daughter of an old and artistic family, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the Governor of New Amsterdam, on her mother’s side. The family, which eventually included 7 children, spent considerable time on the Hudson River in a 1750's house known as “Danskammer,” inherited by her father; and later spent summer vacations at a lake house in North Hatley, Quebec, Canada. When Margaret was a young girl, the family lived in Florence, where her father, Maitland Armstrong, a diplomat and stained-glass designer and colleague of John LaFarge, practiced his craft. Margaret is said to have enjoyed assisting him in his studio.

In the 1870s the family moved to 58 West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, then the heart of the City’s bohemian artistic community, and where Margaret lived and worked most of her life. Friends and neighbors included artists like Edwin Austin Abbey, Winslow Homer and William Merit Chase, and architect Stanford White, who redecorated the 10th Street house for the Armstrong family. Two of her siblings had significant careers as well: Helen was also an illustrator and artist who often worked on projects with her sister; and her youngest brother, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, served as the managing editor of the journal Foreign Affairs from 1928-1972 and wrote an autobiography, Those Days, published in 1963.

Margaret was educated by a governess and studied at the Art Students League. Her career began in 1883 at the age of sixteen when she sent some menus and place cards that she had made to the Women's Exchange in New York City to be sold. She and her sister, Helen, began designing a series of Christmas cards for the family at this time. Her first book cover design was published in 1890. She so feared being exposed as a woman working in what was at that time a man's profession that she submitted her first work, Sweet William by Marguerite Bouvet, under the name M.N. Armstrong.

Beyond Margaret’s obvious talent, several major exhibitions devoted to book design and bindings at about the same time directed more attention to her work. In 1893 the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition provided an entire building for exhibits relating to women. Her work was displayed here; her cover designs won an award and a mention in Frank Linstow White's 1893 article on "Younger Women in American Art". In 1894, the Grolier Club published a catalog of book artists that described her as a "designer of great versatility and eminent skill" whose "skill in adapting, combining, and creating designs which are almost flawless in excellence has made her book covers famous." In an 1895 article in the New York Times about the art of book design, she was cited: “Perhaps Charles Scribner’s Sons have as large a collection of signed book covers as any other firm in the city. Margaret Armstrong has designed many of the covers they have brought out, and on several of them appear in an inconspicuous place the initials, 'M.A.' They are delightfully appropriated, these designs of Miss Armstrong, for the books which the covers inclose [sic]; very pretty and artistic, with just enough of the significance of the character of the book – an appropriate suggestion, not a full-fledged illustration to repel the reader instead of luring him on to further pleasing developments within.”

By the turn of the century Margaret was considered to be the most important woman working in book design in this country. She utilized bold and strikingly colored inks and bookcloths, and often designated that gold-stamped areas be both glossy and matte to heighten the effect and create interest. Her use of slightly asymmetrical designs, however, set hers apart from many of her contemporaries. She was extremely prolific, designing more than 300 bindings between 1890-1940, the majority between 1895 and 1911 for Scribner's and Putnam; and designed multiple bindings for several authors, including George Washington Cable, Paul Leicester Ford, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Paul Bourget, and Frank Stockton. In the years 1900 and 1901 she undertook two major projects with Scribners, a complete series of twelve in uniform blue cloth for the works of Henry Van Dyke and a similar series in lavender for the works of Myrtle Reed. These designs reveal many common elements in her work: a compartmentalized "stained glass" technique which boxed in elements in the designs; the use of botanical designs; symmetry; and the ornamental use of her own distinctive lettering in alphabets and type fonts of her own creation. Two of her most exuberantly lettered covers are Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleeping Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, published by Putnam in 1899.

After 1907 her output of cover designs gradually decreased until about 1913 when she worked almost exclusively on design and writing of her own books and an autobiography by her father, Day Before Yesterday: Reminiscenses of a Varied Life, published in 1920. In her mid-forties, she spent a few years travelling around the western United States. In 1911, she and some friends were the first women to descend to the floor of the Grand Canyon where she discovered some new flower species. A few years later, in 1915, her first authored book, Field Book of Western Wildflowers, which included over five hundred of her drawings, was published. In her later years, she also wrote a family history, Five Generations: Life and Letters of an American Family (1930), for which she also designed the cover, and two very successful biographies, Fanny Kemble, A Passionate Victorian, in 1938 and Trelawny, A Man's Life in 1940 as well as three murder mysteries, Murder in Stained Glass, The Man with No Face, and The Blue Santo Murder Mystery.

Influential in her own time, Margaret Armstrong's exceptional book design work has been the focus of several major exhibits during the past 20 years. Books with her designs became scarce and rose sharply in value after a catalog of her titles, A Checklist of Trade Bindings by Margaret Armstrong, was published by the University of California Library in 1968.