William Sergeant Kendall (1869-1938), Portrait of Robert Blum for “Robert Blum’s Great Decorative Painting in January Scribner’s”, no date [1895]. Pastel painting. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2006.02621

Sergeant Kendall designed three posters for Scribner & Company that were lithographed by J. E. Rhodes. One presents a full length portrait of the artist Robert Blum (1857-1903). The poster, probably completed in December 1895, announced an article about Blum’s recently completed mural for the Mendelssohn Hall in New York, published in Scribner’s January 1896 issue. Kendall’s other two posters offer similar portraits of Charles Dana Gibson and Charles Stanley Reinhart for Scribner’s articles.

“Alfred Corning Clark, in addition to his interest in music, was a patron of the visual arts. As part of the decoration of the interior of Mendelssohn Hall, as the new building on 40th Street was called, Clark commissioned Robert Frederick Blum, muralist, colorist, and illustrator, to do twin panels for either side of the proscenium arch in the concert hall. The first, begun in 1893 and completed in 1895, was called “Moods of Music.” The frieze was 50 feet long and 12 feet high. Later, Blum completed the companion piece, a canvas of equal size entitled “Feast of Bacchus.”

The Graphic Arts Collection holds Kendall’s pastel portrait of Blum, completed for Scribner’s poster. For many years, the attribution was incorrectly switched, described as a portrait of Kendall rather than of Blum. Happily this has now been corrected.

We had a question recently about our collection of Princeton University campus views by Julian Ellsworth Garnsey (1887-1969). From 1941 until his death, Garnsey lived and worked in Princeton as Associate Professor at Princeton University’s School of Architecture, as well as serving as a color consult for the city of Princeton. Many exhibitions of his watercolors have been held over the years in University and city venues.

In the summer of 1944, Garnsey began making a pictorial record of the Princeton campus. As W.E. Wagner Jr. wrote “Perched on a totally inadequate stool and surrounded by many onlookers, Associate Professor Julian E. Garnsey may be found, on clear days, continuing his work of making a picture record of the campus in full color. The Princeton campus which, being a Harvard man, he still is apt to call ‘the yard,’ in unguarded moments has, according to Professor Garnsey, vistas of unequalled beauty. In his water-color paintings of the campus he takes no liberties, and sometimes finds the exact copying ‘quite monotonous.’”

“…Painting in water color is merely his hobby, and he does not wish to be known as a painter. He came to Princeton two and one half years ago after a busy life as a mural painter and color consultant. Among his commissions before coming to Princeton, was the decoration of an entire group of new buildings for the University of California at Los Angeles. In one of his mural paintings there he painted Dr. Einstein for probably the first time. He was color consultant to the New York World’s Fair and was responsible for the color of all the buildings at the fair.”–Princeton Bulletin 2, no. 87 (28 August 1944)

Here are a few of the Graphic Arts Collection’s eight watercolors by Garnsey.

At one time, Garnsey sold his views as greeting cards through The Little Gallery at 39 Palmer Square. There may still be copies of these in personal collections around Princeton.

Rudolph Müller (1802-1885), Jungfrau and the Valley of Lauterbrunnen, 1840. Oil on canvas. Graphic Arts Collection GA 2011.01493. Gift of J. Monroe Thorington, Class of 1915.

“After a variety of windings came to an enormous rock. Arrived at the foot of the mountain, (the Jungfrau, that is, the Maiden) glaciers; torrents; one of these torrents nine hundred feet in height of visible descent. Lodged at the curate’s.

Set out to see the valley; heard an avalanche fall, like thunder; glaciers enormous; storm came on, thunder, lightning, hail; all in perfection, and beautiful . . . Swiss curate’s house very good indeed—much better than most English vicarages. It is immediately opposite the torrent I spoke of. The torrent is in shape curving over the rock, like the tail of a white horse streaming in the wind, such as it might be conceived would be that of the ‘pale horse’ on which Death is mounted in the Apocalypse.

It is neither mist nor water, but a something between both; its immense height (nine hundred feet) gives it a wave or curve, a spreading here, or condensation there, wonderful and indescribable. I think, upon the whole, that this day has been better than any of this present excursion.” –Lord Byron, “Extracts from a Journal,” September 22, 1916, in The Works of Lord Byron: In Verse and in Prose, Including His Letters, Journals, Etc. (Firestone PR4350 .E46)

Contemporary view of Lauterbrunnen

“The Advance Guard of the Feast” was painted by Walter Biggs (1886-1968) for the December 21, 1912 issue of Harper’s Weekly. The art, printed on p. 24, wasn’t included as an illustration for a short story but as a gift from Harper‘s to its readers, referencing the upcoming Christmas holiday. The original painting is in the Graphic Arts Collection but the image had to be heavily PhotoShopped so that the figures can be seen. Even the digital reproduction of the magazine page [below] is difficult to make out. When the work was painted, the twenty-six year old Biggs had finished his classes at the New York School of Art and was making a career as an illustrator. Beginning in 1912, he became a regular contributor to Harper’s Weekly, along with Century Illustrated, McClure’s, Lady’s Home Journal, and many of the other illustrated magazines.

“Biggs began achieving commercial success in 1905, when his illustrations appeared on the covers of Young’s Magazine in January and Field and Stream in July. After completing his formal art studies he rented a small studio and worked on a variety of projects. His early assignments included illustrations for a story in the McClure’s Magazine of October 1908, a color frontispiece for Myrtle Reed’s novel Old Rose and Silver (1909), and drawings for Belle Bushnell’s John Arrowsmith—Planter (1910).

In May 1912 he illustrated a story in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, launching a twelve-year relationship as a contributor to that magazine. In 1913 Biggs’s illustrations appeared in the January issue of the Delineator, in Kate Langley Bosher’s novel The House of Happiness, and in The Land of the Spirit, a collection of short stories by Thomas Nelson Page.

He illustrated a series of stories by Armistead Churchill Gordon that appeared in Scribner’s from 1914 to 1916 and were also published as Ommirandy: Plantation Life at Kingsmill (1917). In 1918 he illustrated a story by Alice Hegan Rice for the Century. Many of those illustrations were set in the American South, and Biggs won praise during his career for his sympathetic portrayals of African American life.”–Encyclopedia of Virginia.