Jessie Willcox Smith (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jessie Willcox Smith Sarah Smedman Schnessel, S. Michael . Jessie Willcox Smith. N. Y.: Thomas Y. Crowell; Toronto; Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1978. Jessie Willcox Smith by S. Michael Schnessel provides a good read, and a better look, for the Good Housekeeping audience as well as for the student of art history and children's literature. Schnessel combines the chatty, repetitive, speculative style of the front porch conversationalist with open, often sentimental admiration for a woman he sees as a self-sufficient, fairy-tale heroine who needed not await a [End Page 37] prince astride a white steed to realize her dreams. In an age which afforded women far less opportunity than men for artistic and personal achievement, Jessie Willcox Smith, unmarried and childless, lived a regular, serene, economically comfortable life, producing magazine covers and illustrations, advertisements, posters, and children's books that earned her national acclaim as an artist and made her name proverbial, reaching more viewers than any artist whose works were displayed in galleries or museums. From the limited facts available to him, Schnessel recreates a remarkably unpretentious, disciplined, generous and vitally youthful artist, remembered for her warmth and human understanding both by her lifelong friends and by the children who modelled for her. Elegantly tall, with a graceful, goddess-like walk, Smith, according to Schnessel, was not beautiful, but inscrutable, her deep-set eyes "hiding thoughts that would never be known to others." Born in 1863, the youngest child of Charles Henry Smith, an investment broker who moved his family from New York to Philadelphia, where they lived on the fringe of high society, Jessie went, at 17, to Cincinnati to study as a kindergarten teacher, never having drawn so much as a doodle in the margins of her books. Dissatisfied with teaching after a very brief career, she returned to Philadelphia to enroll at the School of Design for Women and, subsequently, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she studied portrait painting with Thomas Eakin. After five years as an illustrator, chiefly in the advertising department of the Ladies Home Journal, Smith's art and artistic career were reinvigorated, if not revolutionized, when she was admitted to Howard Pyle's first class in illustration, on Saturday afternoons at Drexel Institute. Pyle's request to teach had previously been rejected by the Pennsylvania Academy, which regarded illustration as an inferior step-sister to pure painting. Crediting Pyle with "wip[ing] away all the cobwebs and confusions that so beset the path of the art student," Smith, in her paintings gradually moved away from heavy outlines and highly decorated spaces like floors and walls, to experiment with daringly different effects of unconventional lighting and areas filled with "broad flat colors." It was Pyle, too, constantly alert for opportunities for his students, who recommended Smith and Violet Oakley, a classmate, to do the illustrations for Evangeline (1897), the first of many such recommendations for illustrations and advertisements. A distinctive feature of Schnessel's book is his interest in the "Brandywine Women," all talented students of Pyle. "Years after [Pyle's] teachings were done [these women] continued to develop into a force and style that grew out of each others' variations from the mean, a force in American illustration that has not yet received its proper recognition." Apparently to spark interest in undertaking a full study, Schnessel interrupts his narrative of Smith with biographical sketches of eighteen of her contemporaries, sketches ranging in length from six lines to more than a full page, and from the deadly factual to the lively colloquial. Schnessel's admiration of the Brandywine women focuses on the small, convivial community Smith and her particular friends, Elizabith Shippen Green (later Elliot) and Violet Oakley, established first on Chestnutt Street, finally at Cogslea. Of the life the artists lived there with Henrietta Cozzens, who managed the household and created its beautiful gardens, and others from time to time, Schnessel conveys an idyllic impression: a pastoral environment, an atmosphere of mutual concern and care devoid of competitiveness and professional jealousy. The women carried on in the best Pyle tradition, supporting each other emotionally and economically and recommending younger artists—as Smith did Carolyn Haywood—for illustrating...