Edward W. Kemble [often, E.W.]
E.W. Kemble, Bric-A-Brac, a feature captioned “The ‘Possum Hunt.” A detail from larger cartoon (see other reproductions) in Century Magazine, June 1890. The shabbily dressed peg-legged black man is involved in some physical comedy in pursuit of an opossum–a mammalian bottom-feeder, by convention the most contemptible quadruped. Ugly humor, by any measure.
American illustrator, 1861-1933.
Edward Kemble spent his school days and early career in Philadelphia, an American publishing center in the 18th century and much of the 19th. In the early 1880s he moved to New York and caught on doing magazine illustration and newspaper cartooning there. work there. He contributed to Life magazine from its founding in 1883; Collier’s Weekly from 1903 to 1907, then again through the 1910s; Harper’s Weekly from 1907 to 1912; as well as Leslie’s Weekly, Puck, and Judge. (Summary paraphrased from the Norman Rockwell Museum illustration history entry on Kemble.)
E.W. Kemble, Huckleberry Finn, Frontispiece from novel of the same name by Mark Twain. 1884.
Title page, “Kemble Edition” of Huck Finn, published in 1927. Designed to profit from then-septugenarian illustrator’s reputation. A fetish for Harper & Brothers marketing purposes—a la “The Director’s Cut.”
Kemble also pursued book illustration work, and secured the enviable assignment of illustrating Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, at the request of the author. “Kemble illustrated other bestsellers, including Twain’s Puddin’ Head Wilson, Washington Irving's Knickerbocker History of New York, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (original 1853 illustrations by Hammatt Billings). Like A. B. Frost, Kemble completed a number of illustrations for Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories.” [See NRM biography.]
Walt Reed argued in his entry on Kemble in The Illustrator in America 1860-1900 that Kemble’s presentation of southern blacks alternated between presenting them with either “great empathy or with the most outrageous of stereotypes.” I think this is overly charitable. Yes, Kemble was capable of empathy in the interpretation of others’ words and stories describing the travails of formerly enslaved blacks. But in his own texts and features—the cartoon work, over which he exerted authorial control—Kemble savaged African Americans, depicting them as grotesques and buffoonish simpletons, recycling characters from blackface minstrelsy. He became known as a “negro illustrator,” which signaled of, not by.
Somewhat incredibly, the Society of Illustrators inducted him into their Hall of Fame in 2007.
Kemble, The Chocolate Drops panel, showing dialogue in caption form, in exaggerated dialect. The use of dialect was common. (I have an estate sale copy of an etiquette manual [circa 1930] written in the cleanest prose possible devoted to the arts of consideration and manners, which nonetheless relies on the trope of an old African American elevator operator who delivers wry observations on human behavior in thick dialect.)
E.W. Kemble, Huck and Jim, spot illustration. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, published 1884 (this printing, 1927). Page 100.
Kemble’s Possum Hunter, 1890.
E.W. Kemble, Bric-A-Brac, in Century Magazine, June 1890.
E.W. Kemble, Huck and Jim, Chapter 10 header illustration. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, published 1884 (this printing, 1927).
E.W. Kemble, The king and duke rehearsing Shakespeare, Chapter 21 header illustration. Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, published 1884 (this printing, 1927).
E.W. Kemble, The Chocolate Drops, comic strip for the American Examiner, 1911. The fetishization of dark skin–chocolate!–is plain.