Inspiring Young Readers
Jessie Willcox Smith
Born in Philadelphia in 1863, Jessie Willcox Smith personifies what is often known as the ‘Golden Age’ of American illustration. She made her name providing illustrations for magazines and advertising but it is undoubtedly her work as an illustrator of children’s books on which her popularity and fame mostly rests. Many of her illustrations have become iconic – ubiquitous even - and are easy to find on higher quality greeting cards, stationery and even wrapping paper. The fact that they tend to focus on children and family life in the latter years of the 19th and early 20th century adds an element of nostalgia to the drawings and this has also led to them being characterised as overly sentimental or sickly sweet. Her use of colour is also striking and this gives the illustrations an almost poster quality – something she emphasised in her early years by adding a border to the pages. She softened her colours and the hard lines over time and to mirror this softer style she also abandoned the borders – giving her full page illustrations a much dreamier feel.
At the end of the 19th century female artists in the US had to struggle to be accepted and the common popular opinion was that their work was inherently second rate – fit only for use in commercial contexts like advertising rather than in genuine fine art contexts. As a result Smith was always in great demand within the magazine market and provided covers for many of the original run of Good Housekeeping. She, however, used these opportunities to develop her work and express the influence of French Impressionism. Her own attitude to her art was closer to the European aesthetic associated with Wilde and Beardsley and she was an outspoken advocate of ‘art for art’s sake’.
Willcox Smith’s work as a children’s book illustrator encompassed titles such as Mother Goose and Dickens’ Christmas Books but her real triumph was Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies which was a real triumph.
Smith resisted travelling out of the States for most of her life but in 1933 she agreed to go on a tour of Europe – where, ironically, she took ill and died suddenly. A little under sixty years after her death she became only the second woman to be inducted into the Illustrator’s Hall of Fame.
I love Smith’s illustrations but I can’t take them in bulk. If you make the mistake of leafing through them page after page, they do in fact become something of a cliché and you start to think you’ve seen each succeeding illustration before even if you haven’t. However, as a individual magazine cover or as an illustration plate spaced throughout a publication, her drawings are transformed and become wholly appropriate and powerful.
Terry Potter
September 2016