Art: Roly Poly

Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, convalescing last week from a painful mastoid operation, got a medal in her morning’s mail from the American Art Dealers Association “for conspicuous service to art in America.” At the same time Mrs. Whitney’s most obvious service, the pink and imposing Whitney Museum of American Art. did last week the sort of thing for which it was established. In conjunction with an amusing showing of the works of provincial U. S. painters of the early 19th Century, the museum had a memorial exhibition of the work of the greatest cartoonist the country has produced: Thomas Nast.

Everyone knows something about Cartoonist Nast’s great battle with paunchy Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall. Many remember that Abraham Lincoln called him “the North’s best recruiting sergeant.” Few remember that Thomas Nast, a potent political figure in the U. S. for 35 years, was born in Landau, Palatinate, Germany, in 1840, emigrated at the age of 6, always spoke English with an accent. He always drew. At the age of 15, a small, fat boy, he asked the imposing Frank Leslie for a job. To get rid of him Publisher Leslie told him to draw the holiday crowds at the Hoboken ferry. So good was the result that fat Tommy Nast was promptly hired—at $4 a week. Constant difficulty in collecting even this salary caused him to leave Leslie’s Weekly. The New York Illustrated News sent him to Italy to follow the triumphal advance of red-shirted Giuseppe Garibaldi up the peninsula. From this almost bloodless war he sent bales of drawings very much like those his great contemporary, Constantin Guys, was doing for the London Illustrated News. When he returned to the U. S. in 1861, 20-year-old “Roly Poly” Nast was already a public character.

Thomas Nast was no soldier in the Civil War, but as a cartoonist he threw himself into it with the same gusto he gave every fight. The South was a nation of tobacco-chewing slave whippers. Lincoln was his saint. Grant his personal hero. In 1862 Fletcher Harper hired him for Harper’s Weekly at a good salary. From that day Harper’s and Nast were an unbeatable team, the most influential artist, the most influential magazine in the country. When they separated in 1886 Harper’s lost its circulation, and Nast, though he tried to start a paper of his own, lost his public.

May 29, 1869 was an important date in the development of Thomas Nast as an artist. That week Sir John Tenniel published a biting cartoon in Punch on the subject of the Alabama Claims* showing the U. S. as a bloated Falstaff demanding £400,000,000 from the bearded Prince of Wales, Edward VII, as the price of his love. Plump Tommy Nast raged at the subject, but admired the technique. A month later he replied with a full page in Harpers Weekly of an even fatter John Bull Falstaff, drawn in the same manner. In this adaptation of the Tenniel technique he thereafter drew all his best known pictures.

Nast’s battle with Tammany Hall and the Tweed Ring was his greatest campaign. In 1870 the Ring, consisting of William Marcy (“Boss”) Tweed, Peter Barr (“Brains”) Sweeney, Richard B. (“Slippery Dick”‘) Connolly, Mayor A. (“Elegant Oakey”) Hall, ruled New York without question. Bearded, bleary-eyed Boss Tweed, who began his career as nose-punching foreman of the Americus or Big Six Fire Co., was Commissioner of Public Works; Brains Sweeney was the lawyer; Slippery Dick was Comptroller of Public Expenditures; Elegant Oakey was the Ring’s social front. Their methods were childishly simple. New York’s books were never shown to anybody. The Ring simply charged the city four times as much as every money bill was worth, and pocketed the difference. British-born Editor Louis John Jennings of the Times fought the Ring as valiantly as did German-born Artist Nast. but the pictures were what moved the public.

“Stop them goddam pictures,” roared Boss Tweed. “My constituents can’t read but dammit they can see pictures.”

The Ring was broken. The Boss fled to Spain, a fugitive from justice. He was arrested in Vigo on the charge of “kidnapping two American children.” This curious charge was explained by the fact that he was identified by a Spanish policeman from an old Nast cartoon that showed the Boss as a Tammany policeman collaring two small ragamuffins, labeled “Lesser Thieves.” The Boss died in New York’s Ludlow Street jail. In his luggage was every Nast cartoon ever drawn of him.

Thomas Nast invented most of the vocabulary of the U. S. political cartoon. He invented the figure of gaunt Uncle Sam, the Tammany Tiger (a reference to the tiger painted on the dashboard of Boss Tweed’s old fire engine, now in the Museum of the City of New York), the Democratic Donkey and Republican Elephant. No other U. S. cartoonist has ever equaled his power, the strength of his line. Out of fashion for ten years before he died, he accepted the post of U. S. consul at Guayaquil, Ecuador from President Roosevelt, died at his post of yellow fever. Last week Critic Henry McBride had this to say of his exhibition:

“The force of statement and finish of workmanship are not to be matched anywhere in present day caricature. . . . One wonders why this should be, and one wonders also if the showing of Nast’s work in a museum may not key up our draughtsmen to bolder expression. It certainly will key up the collectors.”

* At the close of the War the U. S. attempted to collect damages from Britain for the destruction of Union merchantmen by Confederate commerce raiders built in British yards. The C. S. S. Alabama was the most successful.