by Michael Patrick Hearn

During that golden age of American illustration, when work by such distinguished artists as Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Pyle, and Maxfield Parrish graced many of the nation's books and periodicals, one of the most original of the country's designers was Peter Newell. An illustrator of Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Lewis Carroll, Newell was famous for his gentle cartoons in rich, velvety flat tones which enlivened Harper's Monthly, Weekly, Bazaar, Young People, and other national magazines. However, perhaps his most enduring work was that for children, in particular The Hole Book, The Slant Book, and other novelty picture books which he both wrote and illustrated.

Newell was born on March 5, 1862, in the Midwest backwoods, the last of four children of a wagon-maker. "I broke out," he later recalled, "the same time as the Civil War did, in a crossroads in the country in MacDonough Country, Illinois. The place hadn't any name, but its nickname was 'Gungiwam.' Our house was the only frame house in the place (the rest were log huts), and it was clapboarded with walnut." Even when a little boy, Newell was known to draw on anything — the barn door, wagon wheels, the school blackboard. Evidently his parents encouraged his early interest in art, for while he was still in school he entered a large oil painting "The Good Samaritan" in the annual Bushnell fair and won a blue ribbon. However, on graduating from high school at age 16, the amateur artist was apprenticed in a local cigar factory. He stayed only three months. Fortunately, a local entrepreneur took a personal interest in the boy's artistic reputation and found employment for his young protégé in a studio in nearby Jacksonville, Illinois. Here Newell made large crayon portraits by copying photographs of his subjects. Although uninspiring, this labor surely must have schooled the young artist in the subtleties of shading, modeling, and tonal progression which served him well when he began to draw for the halftone process used in national magazines.

But Newell did not want to draw portraits. He wanted to be a cartoonist. Bored with his work in Jacksonville, he found the courage to submit a sketch to the editor of a big Eastern magazine, Harper's Bazaar. The reply was swift and inexplicable: while the note read "No talent indicated," a check was enclosed. Encouraged by this paradoxical evaluation of his work, Newell set off for New York City in 1883 to seek his fortune.

He immediately enrolled at the Art Student League, but barely survived a semester. Newell was restless with his studies. Once, when a waiter was brought in to pose for the sketch class, Newell's drawing aroused the most comment: he had drawn a dead cat on the model's tray. While at school, Newell continued to submit his drawings to the popular illustrated journals. "When I first began to draw for the magazines," he once told a reporter, "there were very few magazines that used pictures. There was Harper's, Scribner's, and Godey's — that was about all." Nevertheless this young, largely self-taught artist succeeded in placing some of his comic designs with their editors. "When I was starting," Newell later admitted, "I cultivated not only my drawing but my imagination. I tried to develop my power of conceiving humorous situations.... If an artist had an idea that caught the editor's fancy, he would receive more favorable attention than an artist who had nothing but a good drawing." Eventually Newell's cartoons began appearing regularly in the national periodicals, including the children's magazines St. Nicholas and Harper's Young People (later Harper's Round Table).

Newell earned his earliest recognition as an illustrator from his amusing pen-and-ink sketches. Magazine and book publishers were then replacing the laborious method of reproduction by wood engraving with the relatively cheaper and easier new process of photo-mechanical printing of illustrations. Unfortunately this new technology took some time to perfect and, in its earliest days, it did not allow for a variety of tone. Consequently, artists were required to work almost exclusively in line. Fortunately, because the camera as yet could not pick up the subtleties in gradation, errors could easily be corrected with white paint and then reworked in india ink. Another result of the limitations of this process was that artists too frequently employed several lines where only one was needed, and so these illustrations were often overwrought.

Newell, however, was drawn to the work of the masters rather than to that of the commonplace artists. His early published sketches in line betray a great debt to the efforts of A.B. Frost and E.W. Kemble, two ofthe most popular and most admired of American illustrators of their day. And Newell learned as much from their subjects as from their clean, crisp pen-and-ink styles. Newell, like Frost and Kemble, became known for his cartoons of rural life, particularly Negro scenes; and consequently he, like Frost and Kemble, was erroneously thought to be a Southerner.

Encouraged by his initial success with the Eastern magazines, Newell returned to Illinois and established his own illustration studio. Now confident of his chosen profession, Newell married his sweetheart, Leona Dow Ashcroft. But Springfield did not prove to be the best place for an illustrator once he had a family to support, and so Newell became an itinerant artist who traveled throughout the Midwest and West, giving chalk talks when he could not get commissions for books and magazines. In 1888, he and his family spent the summer in a tent in Manitou, Colorado, not far from Colorado Springs. Life in the West was still rugged, and several homes near the Newells' had recently been robbed. One morning while walking about the springs, the artist made a terrible discovery — a piece of zinc, covered with blood. Worried for the safety of his wife and his little daughter, he went back to the tent and drew on a large piece of stiff paper the silhouettes of several fierce, rough-looking men. He then cut these out and arranged them along the side of the tent, so that the light of the candle outlined them sharply against the canvas. Newell figured that anyone who passed by the tent would suspect by the shadows that it was inhabited by a band of formidable men and not by the gentle artist, his wife, and their little girl. Apparently this ruse succeeded in discouraging any possible burglars, for the Newells, unlike their neighbors, were never robbed.

Although he enjoyed the scenery of Manitou and the other places he visited, Newell realized that if he were to continue as an illustrator he would have to return to New York. Since his last stay in the city, the publishing industry had begun to depend more and more on the halftone for book and magazine pictures. Although still generally limited to black-and-white, this sensitive new photo-mechanical process nevertheless was liberating to artists, for it gave them a wide range of tone for their designs. Many illustrators now turned from line to wash, and Newell followed this fashion.

One of his earliest experiments with the halftone was the little cartoon "Wild Flowers" (Harper's Weekly, August 1893), depicting a bug-eyed little girl being consoled by an elderly gentleman in a garden. The drawing was accompanied by a silly couplet: "'Of what are you afraid, my child?' Enquired the kindly teacher. / 'Oh, sir, the flowers, they are wildl' Replied the timid creature." Remarkably, this simple little design made Newell famous, and just like Gelett Burgess and his bit of nonsense "The Purple Cow," Newell could not avoid the great notoriety of "Wild Flowers." Its verse was widely quoted and memorized by its admirers, and Newell never knew when he might meet up with one of them. "Not long ago," he told Joyce Kilmer in 1916, "I was to speak at a little dinner, and I admit that I was not very comfortable in my mind about it. A lady who sat near me watched me for a few minutes and then wrote something on her menu, folded it up, and passed it on to me. I opened it and found my wild flower verse."

"Wild Flowers" was only the first of a series of little cartoons with comic verses which appeared sporadically in the back pages of Harper's Monthly and which eventually were collected as Peter Newell's Pictures & Rhymes (1899). This delightful volume proved to be as popular with children as with their parents. Newell possessed a gentle, innocent sense of humor like that of Edward Lear and, although he lacked the Englishman's ability as a poet, Newell nevertheless could make a clever turn of phrase, as in the following verse from his Pictures & Rhymes: "From Foxe's Book of Martyrs Aunt Matilda slowly read, / 'Oh, Aunt, turn over a new leaf,' Her youthful nephew said." Like Lear and his limericks, the comedy in Newell's cartoons was as dependent on the pictures as on the text. However, Newell denied that hehad either seen or read Lear's Book of Nonsense when his American collection of pictures and rhymes was published.

In the halftone, Newell found the proper medium through which to express his particular kind of comedy. He knew what the camera could and could not do. He understood its limitations and profited by them. Indeed, Newell was one of only a few artists of the period who did not sacrifice the distinctive character of his illustrations when making the transformation from line to wash. Newell now simplified his com-positions by containing the forms within bold outlines which in turn he filled in with richly varied flat tones. "I didn't do the first flat tones that were done in this country," he admitted. "Of course, the Japanese had done them before, and so did Boutet de Monvel." And from the Japanese, Newell also learned new forms of dramatic composition and the internal rhythms of intertwining curvilinear lines and contrasting flat colors and patterns. From oriental art, he learned to simplify to get the maximum effect desired; now his designs gained in strength as he dropped all superfluous detail. After all, the point of a cartoon must be immediately understood for it to have any impact. "Every man has his own individuality," he argued. "Some men have been influenced by other artists, but their personality must sooner or later appear in their work if they are to succeed." And succeed he did, in allowing his own personality to emerge through the flat, rhythmic style of his halftone illustrations.

The deceptively simple, almost naive, manner of his illustrations should not suggest that Newell was careless with their preparation. On the contrary, Newell labored on each design until it created just the right effect. For each drawing Newell made a careful preliminary sketch and the transferred this composition to a clean sheet of paper for the final version. He then finished the art with mixed media, sometimes reworking the drawing with pencil, india ink, crayon, wash, watercolor, and white paint for highlights. Many of his illustrations which were reproduced in black and white were originally done in full color. And so painstaking was Newell that if a drawing did not come up to his standards, he did not hesitate to discard it and begin anew. While the Peter Newell manner had its admirers, the original had no equal among its imitators. One of Newell's most ardent followers was the young Lyonel Feininger, the modern American painter and famed teacher at the Bauhaus. In his early years as a professional illustrator Feininger contributed to Harper's Young People charming pictures for fairy tales, drawings which sported the flat tones and bounding outlines of Newell's work in the same periodical. Other artists were able to capture some of the technical grace of Newell's art, but none other quite caught the distinctive comic spirit of Newell's famous cartoons.

Editors were drawn to Newell as much for his dependability as for his infectious good humor. He was given all kinds of texts to illustrate. Among the books which he illustrated (many of which were originally serialized in magazines) were Mark Twain's Following the Equator (1897) and Stephen Crane's Whilomville Stories (1900). Perhaps his most famous book illustrations in his own day were those for John Kendrick Bangs' A House-Boat on the Styx (1896) and its several sequels. The success of these undistinguished best-sellers was credited as much to the pictures as to their texts.

No matter what the commission, whether it be his own nonsense verse or Ivory Soap ads in the back pages of St. Nicholas, Newell was always conscientious in his labors. "An illustrator should be fully familiar with the story for which he is making the pictures," he believed. "I always read a story three or four times, so as to be thoroughly acquainted with it before I make any pictures for it. Accuracy in the representation of characters in fiction is an important part of an illustrator's equipment." Accuracy in small details was as important to Newell as the correct representation of characters. Newell was known to spend considerable time to authenticate little points of costumes and settings for his illustrations. However, he never worked directly from the model. Instead he relied on his own imagination and powers of invention. "It seems to me," he told Kilmer, "that an artist who is to make a success of illustrating must possess the qualities necessary for success on the stage. A successful illustrator must be able to reproduce characters and to produce the emotion present in the incident which he is depicting. All great illustrators have had this power — it is the only way in which an artist can give the text a correct interpretation.... He must be able to project himself into the scene he is drawing. He must identify himself with the characters of the situation. He must be able to induce the emotions which those characters are supposed to feel.... Many times I have found myself with my face distorted like those of the characters I was drawing." Indeed, many of his bug-eyed, spindly-legged grotesques look much like the artist himself, a tall, gawky gentleman with bushy eyebrows, moustache and abundant curly hair. "If an artist has this sort of imaginative power, this power of projecting himself into his work, and is a good draftsman," he concluded, "I think that he will be a successful illustrator."

Another reason for Newell's success in the field was that he was always working, for books, magazines, and newspapers. He knew well some of the problems created by unreasonable deadlines. He once admitted, "I have seen a few illustrations in which the artist has departed from the text — representing the hero of a story as smooth-shaven when the author gave him a beard, for instance. But sometimes this is really not the artist's fault; it is the fault of the editor, who has given him an order for a lot of work to be done in a hurry, and has not given him sufficient time to read the story carefully." And Newell had no patience with the artist who did not diligently do his work. "I never could understand this bohemian business very well," he complained. "There are some writers and painters who do their work right along, like masons and carpenters. That's the way I do it. I don't see any reason for why an artist shouldn't be an honest, hard-working citizen like anybody else. As a matter of fact, I am inclined to think that these people who sit around waiting for inspiration are lazy. The position that they take is nothing but a pose. If they got married and had responsibilities resting on them they'd speedily be cured.... Some of my best work has been done while I had a baby in my lap."

This hard-working father did find time to be with his own two little girls and little boy. He became something of a local celebrity in Leonia, the little New Jersey town named for Mrs. Newell; and he did all he could to contribute to the community. He served as a Sunday School superintendent and on the local boards of education and health; he was a founder and first president of the Men's Neighborhood Club of Leonia. He played the piano, flute, and cello, and sang in the choir; he enjoyed fishing and tennis, but his particular passion was chess. And what little spare time he had left he spent carving little wooden figures. He was also a great favorite with the local boys and girls for his simple slight of hand tricks, and all of them knew him as their "Uncle Peter."

The proud father was often inspired by his own children. Once, when he found one of them struggling with a picture book which was turned upside down, Newell decided to create a children's book which could be read from either angle. The two-volume Topsys & Turvys (1893 and 1894) were the happy results. A child need only turn over this book of chromolithographed pictures to transform an elephant into an ostrich, a farmer into his pig, some ladies into butterflies, plates of ice cream into little boys. Newell explained in the second volume, "This book is like a tumbler. It's thus that you begin it, / But till it is inverted, There's always more within it." The conceit of these books does seem simple enough, but surprisingly few other artists (most notably Rex Whistler in !Oho!, 1946; Hilary Knight in Sylvia the Sloth, 1969; and Gustave Verbeck in his early comic strip "The Upside-Downs of Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo") have attempted this clever, and challenging, form of picture story-telling. Newell followed his popular Topsys & Turvys with another ingenious picture book, A Shadow Show (1896), an obvious imitation of Charles Henry Bennett's Shadows (two volumes, 1857 and 1858). As in its Victorian prototype, A Shadow Show reveals the true nature of each of its subjects by the shape made by its outline.

More than any other American illustrator of the day, Newell explored the possibilities of the form of the picture book. So inventive were his novelty books that sometimes he had to take out a patent rather than the usual copyright to fully protect his literary curiosities. In both The Hole Book (1898) and its sequel The Rocket Book (1912), a hole was actually cut through the pages to show the humorous consequences of what happened, in the first volume, after little Tom Potter accidentally shoots his father's pistol and, in the second, when naughty Fritz the janitor's boy sets off a rocket which goes from the basement through the floors of an apartment building. Even more eccentric than this pair of "hole books" is The Slant Book (1910), trimmed on an angle to dramatize the adventures of a runaway baby carriage as it races down a steep hill. In each of these clever volumes, the silly two-color pictures were accompanied by harmless doggerel which perhaps was unnecessary, for the joke of each situation is so completely told in the illustration.

The most ambitious (and most controversial) of Newell's children's books were his editions of Alice 's Adventures in Wonderland (1901), Through the Looking Glass (1902), and The Hunting of the Snark (1903). Surely one cannot imagine Lewis Carroll's classic Alice books without the original illustrations by John Tenniel, but Harper & Brothers decided that it was time the famous children's stories were updated. It must have been an honor for Peter Newell to have been chosen for this prestigious commission, but the artist was also prepared to defend the apparent audacity of his trying to replace Tenniel. "It may appear presumptuous... to portray what Alice means to me," Newell began his explanation in Harper's Monthly (October 1901). “But the kindness with which the public has received my other work, together with the encouragement of certain friends (to whom the inception of this undertaking is due) has inspired the hope in me that this more serious effort will not be altogether unwelcome." And seriously did Newell approach the project. "The dominant note in the character of Alice is childish purity and sweetness," the artist continued. “A sweet, childish spirit at home in the midst of mystery! ... a little girl... with lessons to learn and duties to perform — a demure, quaint little girl, with a strict regard for the proprieties of life, and a delicate sense of consideration of the feelings of others.... And underlying all of this is that a simple, sincere faith which seems to be the peculiar property of childhood, and which upon all occasions includes in her a respectable attitude, however absurd may be the situation."

Maybe so, but Newell in his pictures emphasized the absurdity, not the respectability, of Carroll's creations. Certainly Newell was somewhat restricted to Tenniel's original conceptions of the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Mock Turtle, the Cheshire Cat, and all the other odd personages; but the American nevertheless brought them all vividly to life in his own pictures. The books being crammed with countless full-page halftone plates, Newell had the luxury of depicting incidents that not even Tenniel had the opportunity to illustrate; and even the least important subject was sympathetically treated by the new artist. Newell argued that all of Carroll's absurd creatures are "real characters on a common plane of humor, action, and interest," that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a play in which each subordinate actor is as excellent in his way as the lead. But perhaps only Newell's Alice (based on the artist's daughter josephine) fails; this dark-haired, rather plain, too mature child is not the ideal Alice.

Newell's Alice was not to everyone's taste, but Harper & Brothers were pleased enough with the new Carroll volumes to hire Newell to illustrate Favorite Fairy Tales (1907). This prestigious project, in the same elegant format as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, brought together classic children's stories recommended by such prominent public figures as Mark Twain, Henry James, Howard Pyle, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, and Jane Addams. Although the text did have its errors (for example, Charles Perrault is credited as the author of two English fairy tales, "Jack the Giant Killer" and "Jack and the Beanstalk"), no such carelessness marred the fine illustrations. In Favorite Fairy Tales, the famous cartoonist had the opportunity rare in his career to interpret the poetic side of children's literature. Known primarily as a humorist, Newell on occasion even illustrated travesties of nursery books; for example, Guy Wetmore Carryl's Fables for the Frivolous (1898) were elaborate parodies of La Fontaine's work, and his Mother Goose for Grown-Ups take offs on the traditional nursery rhymes. Newell, though, in interpreting such selections as "The Gastronomic Guile of Simple Simon" and "The Opportune Overthrow of Humpty Dumpty," played it straight: his pictures of Simple Simon and Humpty Dumpty in this collection would be appropriate for any conventional edition of Mother Goose rhymes. Likewise, in Favorite Fairy Tales, Newell successfully interpreted the histories of such nursery celebrities as Aladdin, Snow White and Rose Red, and Beauty and her Beast with uncommon grace and affection. The only disappointment with Favorite Fairy Tales is that, in restricting the artist to one picture a story, there are far fewer plates in this collection than in the earlier Alice books.

With the growth of the Sunday comic strip at the turn of the century, Newell, one of the country's acknowledged great comic illustrators, naturally tried his hand at the new form. For his series in the New York Sunday Herald, Newell returned to Lewis Carroll. As did Alice in Wonderland, Polly Sleepyhead each Sunday went through some marvelous adventure and then awoke in the last frame. Newell's strip had already been anticipated by Winsor McCay's classic "Little Nemo in Slumberland," which preceded "The Naps of Polly Sleepyhead" in the Herald's Sunday funny papers. Although Newell's effort lacked the architectural extravagance of McCay's more famous dream series, "The Naps of Polly Sleepyhead" still was beautifully drawn and possessed a simple, child-like humor. Being perhaps too fragile to survive in the rough-and-tumble world of Buster Brown and the Katzenjammer Kids, Newell's delightful strip lasted only about a year.

Since his death on January 15, 1924, in Little Neck, Long Island, Peter Newell has been largely forgotten. He now receives scant mention in the popular studies of American illustration and children's book artists. Perhaps his gentle slapstick now seems dated, while the anarchistic violence of the Katzenjammer Kids remains au courant. And there is nothing particularly pretty about Newell's grotesques; even in the relatively restrained Favorite Fairy Tales, Newell's pictures retain the veneer of the vulgar animated cartoon. Nevertheless, Newell was an original, and his contribution to American illustration is inestimable. Fortunately a few of Newell's picture books have recently been reissued, so new readers may now find some amusement in the charming wit of one of America's most inventive comic artists.