Until I discovered that Jessie Willcox Smith was born September 6, 1863, I had never heard of the “Golden Age of American illustration.” It happened between about 1880 and about 1920, when printing went through a period of technological advancement pretty much like what happened with personal computing a century later. Mass production of paper arrived, making it much more available and less expensive. It became economical to reproduce, in books and magazines, color pictures in high quality. Production of books and magazines grew exponentially.
All those printed materials needed pictures, and illustrators like N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, and Howard Pyle became highly successful, quite well known, and amazingly prolific. The one considered the greatest was Jessie Willcox Smith.
Smith originally intended to become a teacher, and began teaching kindergarten in 1883. But she discovered that bending over to the children’s level gave her back trouble. It was apparently severe enough that when she accompanied a friend to an art class and discovered she was good at drawing, she quit teaching and enrolled in art school. She published her first illustration in St. Nicholas Magazine when she was still in art school, in 1888. Illustration, particularly for children’s books, was considered an appropriate role for female artists at the time, because of their “maternal instincts” (why those instincts didn’t seem to enable every woman to become an illustrator was conveniently left out of the frame).
She landed a job in the advertising department of Lady’s Home Journal magazine, which had a huge circulation at the time. While she worked on advertising art, in 1892 she illustrated a book in her spare time: New and True: rhymes and rhythms and histories droll for boys and girls from pole to pole by Mary Staver. The book sold pretty well (in spite of the title), and Smith’s career began to accelerate. She left Lady’s Home Journal to produce illustrations for a book by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as other major magazines. She and two colleagues, Elizabeth Shippen Green and Violet Oakley, leased the Red Rose Inn in Pennsylvania and turned it into a live-in illustration studio. They became widely known when Alice Carter wrote The Red Rose Girls.
As the leading illustrators in an age when illustration was booming, they also did quite well financially, each earning the equivalent of nearly $400,000 per year (according to the New York Times). Smith developed a particularly close relationship with Good Housekeeping magazine, and created every single cover they published between 1917 and 1933 (and it was a monthly magazine).
Smith never liked traveling, but was talked into a tour of Europe in 1933, which turned out to be the very picture of a bad decision; she got sick on the trip and never recovered. You can see a lot of Smith’s work at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute, and if you look up “illustration” in Wikipedia, the first image is by Smith.
