Midterm Writing Exercise
Winslow Homer, Our National Winter Exercise—Skating. Broadsheet-sized wood engraving, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, January 13, 1866.
So much to report, and to reflect on. We have launched our new MFA in Illustration and Visual Culture, and I am deep into a survey course blending lecture and discussion dubbed The Illustrated Periodical, which is a way of grounding a history of illustration in the activity of serial format publishing. More to it than that, of course, but that will do for a gloss. Much more to come another day.
For now, I am addressing our first class of MFA-IVCers: Here is your promised writing prompt, with a suite of 12 images to be used as touchstones as you put together your argument. Draw on readings and lectures as well.
Compose an essay of 1500-2000 words which addresses the emergence of the illustrated periodical and the profession of illustration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to 1940. Please incorporate at least six images and six course readings into your argument. Cite all sources. Consider social, cultural, technological, commercial, and aesthetic factors. Please turn in hard copy of your essay in class on Monday, November 5 and submit a pdf version electronically the same day.
Jessie Gillespie, 49 Cents, Today Only. Cartoon drawing for Life Magazine, circa 1912.
Coles Phillips, magazine advertisement for Overland Motorcars, 1915.
J.C. Leyendecker, Thanksgiving, 1628-1928. Cover illustration, Saturday Evening Post, November 24, 1928.
Tom Howard, Execution of Ruth Snyder, clandestine photograph made at Sing Sing Prison, January 12, 1928. Published in the New York Daily News the following day.
Graves Gladney, The Fifth Face. Cover illustration for The Shadow, August 15, 1940.
Edward Penfield, poster for Harpers Monthly, August 1894.
Alice Barber Stephens, The Woman in Business. Cover illustration, Ladies Home Journal, September 1897.
Elizabeth Shippen Green, Playing Parcheesi, March/April calendar page for The Child, a promotional calendar jointly published by ESG and Jessie Willcox Smith, 1904.
Maxfield Parrish, The King and Queen might eat thereupon, and noblemen besides. Magazine advertisement for Jell-O, 1922.
Stuart Davis, cover illustration, The New Masses, June 1926. (The Masses folded in 1917; The New Masses was published from 1926 to 1942.)
N.C. Wyeth, Custer’s Last Stand, Lucky Strike magazine advertisement, 1930.