Jessie Willcox Smith
A Beautiful Legacy

Jessie Willcox Smith is one of dozens of young women employed and trained by Howard Pyle in the turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau fairy tale boom, Jessie Willcox is famed for her sensitive and gentle depictions of mothers and children, or children under the protection of female figures.

Unlike most of Pyle's brilliant students, Wilcox Smith was not a child prodigy. She did not know she could draw until, at the age of 20, a relative coerced her into taking an art class he was teaching. To everyone's surprise, she was naturally gifted.

A kindergarten teacher at the time, she decided that the artist's life was for her, and she went to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, learning from artists like Thomas Eakins.

When she graduated in 1888, she picked up a few art jobs, then after a year went to work for Ladies' Home Journal, one of the many domestic magazines that started at this time. She spent her days doing low-level illustrations and working with artists of some fame.

Five years at Ladies' Home Journal was enough, and she left to attend classes with Howard Pyle at then then just-founded Drexel, and followed him to Brandywine School, which was more an artists' colony than a school.

Her decision to study with Pyle was a formative choice, for she met and roomed with fellow artists Elizabeth Shippen Green and Violet Oakley there, and they remained friends for life. They became known as the Red Rose Girls, and to this day their works are often exhibited together.

Out of the Brandywine School art colony, dozens of young women artists found their path under Pyle's tutelage. He taught that women should take their artistic careers seriously, perhaps the only significant art teacher in America who did.

This gave Wilcox Smith wings; she continued illustrating various books, and hit true fame when she did the paintings for Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, one of Pyle's projects.

Later, she also illustrated Charles Kingsley's Water Babies and the 1911 Blackie and Sons version of George MacDonald's At The Back Of The North Wind.

By 1905, she was painting covers regularly for a host of women's magazines, creating a wonderful world of mothers and children that she never shared in; the great lover and teacher of children would remain unmarried and childless until she died.

Her clients included Century, Collier's Weekly, Leslie's, Harper's McClure's, Scribner's, and her old employer Ladies' Home Journal. She also continued illustrating book after book, adding immensely to the wonderful turn-of-the-century publication trend toward books with full-color plates.

It was in the magazine Good Housekeeping, however, that she attained her fullest fame; for fifteen years from 1917 through 1933 she painted every single cover.

Her artwork helped shape the early 20th century view of the child, from what they should be doing to what they should be wearing. As much as Norman Rockwell, Jessie Willcox Smith shaped what we call Americana today.

Jessie Willcox Smith used many different mediums for her art, from simple black pen to dreamy watercolors. Her style is impressionistic at times, but with a distinct Art Nouveau flavor.

While most people do not know her name, few people who read fairy stories and children's classics as children would not recognize her work.

She was one of the few students of Pyle who maintained a career past the 1920s, and this in spite of being his oldest student. She created magical works of art until 1935, when she died in her sleep of a long illness.

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