Jessie Willcox Smith was one of the most prominent female illustrators in the United States, during the famed ‘Golden Age of Illustration‘.
Smith was born in the Mount Airy neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A, as the youngest girl of Charles Henry Smith, an investment broker, and Katherine DeWitt Willcox Smith. At the age of sixteen she was sent to Cincinnati, Ohio, and trained to be a teacher and taught kindergarten. Smith found the physical demands of working with children too strenuous for her however.
Persuaded by a friend to attend some local art classes, Smith soon realised she had an incredible talent for drawing.
Smith attended the ‘Philadelphia School of Design for Women’ and the ‘Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ in Philadelphia. She studied under Thomas Eakins and Thomas Anshute’s supervision. It was under Eakins that Smith began to use photography as a resource in her illustrations.
Smith graduated in June 1888. She joined the first magazine for women, the Ladies’ Home Journal the same year. At the same time she enrolled in Saturday classes at Drexel University with Howard Pyle. She was in his first class at Drexel, which had almost 50% female students. Pyle pushed many artists of Smith’s generation to fight for their right to illustrate for the major publishing houses of the time.
Smith met Elizabeth Shippen Green and Violet Oakley while studying at Drexel. The women shared talent, mutual interests, and lifelong friendship.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Smith’s career flourished. Green, Smith, and Oakley became known as ‘The Red Rose Girls.’ This nickname referenced the Red Rose Inn in Villanova, Pennsylvania, where they lived and worked together for four years – beginning in the early 1900s.
Smith was a member of Philadelphia’s ‘The Plastic Club’ (founded 1897), an organization established to promote ‘Art for art’s sake’. Other members included Elenore Abbott, Violet Oakley, and Elizabeth Shippen Green. In 1905, Smith produced some of her best-known and most-loved illustrations, for A Child’s Garden of Verses written by the famed Robert Louis Stevenson.
In 1911, Smith had a sixteen room house and studio build that she called ‘Cogshill’. It was situated near Cogslea, Philadelphia. Over the next few years she continued to create illustrations for magazines. These included a series of Mother Goose illustrations made in black and white until mid-1914, when they were printed in colour. Her illustrations were reproduced in the book The Jessie Willcox Smith Mother Goose by ‘Dodd, Mead, and Company’. In 1915, Smith finished one of her most celebrated works: Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies.
Smith’s style changed drastically throughout her life. In the beginning of her career, she used dark lined borders to delineate brightly coloured objects and people. This was done in a style described as ‘Japanesque’. In later works she softened the lines and colours until they almost disappeared. Smith worked in mixed media. She used oil-paint, watercolour, pastels, gouache, charcoal – whatever she felt gave her desired effect. She often overlaid oils on charcoal, on a paper whose grain or texture added an important element to the work. Her use of colour was influenced by the French impressionist painters.
In 1991, Smith was the second woman to be inducted into ‘The Hall of Fame’ of the ‘Society of Illustrators’.
(source: https://www.pookpress.co.uk/project/jessie-willcox-smith-biography/)