8/28/2023 0 Comments Maxon crumb honoredThe next guy down the line from him is a guy named A.B. You look through these old Harpers Weekly, or any other 19th century magazines that are full engraved pictures, and his are by far the strongest. And I think it had to be the same guy, this engraver, for about 20 years because the style is very distinctive and similar. And it's good, they're good, but his inked cross-hatching is not as strong as the engraved cross-hatching done by his engraver. When the photo-offset technology came in the 1880s, then Nast started inking the cartoons himself. His engraver had this incredible, strong way of translating the drawings with this engraving cross-hatching technique. The engraver took his original drawings and then engraved them onto the plate for printing. Wonderful! The strongest visual stuff from that period in America.Īnd yes, he was the best at cross-hatching, but the unsung hero is his engraver. I have a big stack of the old Harper's Weekly from the 1870s and '80s and sometimes I get them out just to look at the artwork. So that part of what he did was righteous, but later on, through his misguided loyalty, he supported some of the wrong people politically. There was a huge amount of graft and kick-backs going on. They robbed New York and the city treasury in the 1870s. At that time the Democratic party was very corrupt. He was really down on the Democratic party. And he later defended Republicans who really didn't deserve to be defended he was stuck on that party. But then he became so successful that that he became stuck, as a loyal adherent, to the Republican party. He helped break the Tweed Ring with the cartoons he did at Harper's Weekly. The Tweed Ring tried to bribe him and they even threatened him, but Nast just wouldn't go for it. So for a while, he had a huge amount of political power. Also, at that time, when he was working at Harper's Weekly, before the invention of photo offset printing, those cartoons were the strongest visual media there was. To me, it's just the strongest visual reflection of that time other than photographs that I know of. I just loved the way he depicts people, and his cross-hatching style. I remember reading a book in the school library called The Presidency, it was a history of the US presidents, and it used lots of Thomas Nast cartoons at that period-the 1870s and '80s, when he was at his high point. I first discovered his work in high school history books, you know, they would use his drawings to summarize what was going on at the time. Robert: Thomas Nast is one of my favorites, one of my main sources for visual inspiration for my drawing since I was a teenager.
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