Thomas Nast

• Born: 27 September 1840
• Birthplace: Landau, Germany
• Died: 7 December 1902 (yellow fever)
• Best Known As: 19th century cartoonist who drew Santa

Illustrator Thomas Nast was the first American celebrity cartoonist, famous for helping to turn out New York's corrupt politicians and for creating peristent iconographic images of Santa Claus. Nast, from a family of German immigrants, began working in New York City as a cartoonist at the age of 15. He had a long association with Harper's Weekly (1861-86), during which his battlefield illustrations and skilled caricatures made him famous in the U.S. and abroad (Van Gogh was a collector). Nast was an opinionated, progressive Republican, and his illustrated attacks on the leader of New York's Democrats, William "Boss" Tweed, are said to have helped bring down an era of government corruption. One of the most influential caricaturists of his time, he is credited with creating the image of Santa as a chubby fellow in a red suit. Nast also came up with the image of an ass to represent Democrats (around 1870) and an elephant to represent Republicans (1874). His popularity waned in the 1880s, and he parted ways with Harper's Weekly over political and artistic differences. Failing to succeed with his own publication or as a painter, he managed to be appointed by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1902 to a diplomatic position in Ecuador, where he contracted yellow fever and died.

Now officially embraced icons, the animal symbols of the two political parties were meant by Nast to be unflattering.

(click to enlarge)
Thomas Nast, self-portrait etching, 1892 (credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born Sept. 27, 1840, Landau, Baden — died Dec. 7, 1902, Guayaquil, Ecua.) German-born U.S. political cartoonist. He arrived in the U.S. at six, and from 1862 to 1886 he worked as a cartoonist for Harper's Weekly. His cartoons in support of the Northern cause in the American Civil War were so effective that Abraham Lincoln called him "our best recruiting sergeant." Many of his most effective cartoons were attacks on the New York City political machine of William Magear Tweed in the 1870s; one led to Tweed's identification and arrest in Spain. Nast originated the Republican Party's elephant, the Democratic Party's donkey, and one of the most popular images of Santa Claus. Left destitute by the failure of a brokerage house, he was appointed U.S. consul in Ecuador, where he died.

For more information on Thomas Nast, visit Britannica.com.

(b Landau, Bavaria, 27 Sept 1840; d Guayaquil, Ecuador, 7 Dec 1902). American illustrator of German birth. His family emigrated to the USA and settled in New York when he was six. Precocious at drawing, Nast was taught by the German-born history painter Theodore Kaufmann (b 1814) and later studied briefly at the National Academy of Design. In 1855, aged 15, he began to work for Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Magazine, which continued to publish his political cartoons until 1858.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The American caricaturist and painter Thomas Nast (1840-1902) is noted for his political cartoons attacking corruption in New York City government and supporting Radical Reconstruction in the South.

Thomas Nast was born on Sept. 27, 1840, in Ludwig, Bavaria. The family emigrated to the United States in 1846, and Thomas was raised and schooled in New York City. He displayed an early talent for drawing. At the age of 15 he took some drawings to Leslie's Weekly, one of the popular magazines of the day, and was hired as an illustrator. In 1862 he joined Harper's Weekly. Throughout the Civil War he turned out patriotic drawings exhorting Northern readers to help crush the Rebels. Abraham Lincoln called him "our best recruiting sergeant."

By the end of the war Nast and Harper's Weekly had become virtually inseparable, and Nast turned his hand toward attacking President Andrew Johnson's attempts to subvert the Radical Republican Reconstruction program. He hammered away at those who tried to undermine Negro political rights in the South with the same zeal and venom he had used earlier on Rebels.

In attacking Johnson's policies, Nast began to depart from conventional representational illustration by distorting and exaggerating the physical traits of his subjects. Because of the technical skill and the self-righteous fervor he brought to the task, it was often said that the art of political caricature reached a new peak of sophistication and importance in his work.

The heights were probably reached in Nast's unrelenting attack against political corruption in New York City in the early 1870s. Nast's caricatures of William "Boss" Tweed and his henchmen in Tammany Hall (the New York County Democratic political machine) played a major role in defeating the machine and imprisoning Tweed. Nast demonstrated his own incorruptibility by refusing to accept a $200,000 bribe to stop his attacks.

During the political crusades Nast also made what have become his most famous, if not his most important, contributions to American politics: he invented and popularized the Democratic donkey, the Republican elephant, and the Tammany tiger. Nast reached his peak of fame, influence, and wealth in the 1870s. Thereafter he began a long, frustrating decline. Technical changes in magazine reproduction led to the obsolescence of the wood-carved plates at which he excelled. In addition, his continued attempts to reopen the wounds of the Civil War made many people uneasy. Tweed's death in 1878 deprived Nast of another favorite target. Nast tried his hand at attacking various other groups who aroused his ire, such as labor unionists (whom he portrayed as vicious, foreign, bomb-throwing anarchists) and the Catholic Church, but the public failed to respond with the same enthusiasm. His contract with Harper's Weekly terminated in 1884, and his work appeared with decreasing frequency.

In 1902 Nast was rescued from an impecunious end by an admirer, President Theodore Roosevelt, who arranged for his appointment as U.S. consul in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Nast did not really want to go to Guayaquil. However, he was in no position to turn down a steady source of income. He died there of yellow fever on Dec. 7, 1902.

Further Reading

The standard work on Nast is Albert Bigelow Paine, Th. Nast: His Period and His Pictures (1904). Although uncritical and dated in its historical interpretations, Paine's work contains a wealth of information on Nast and examples of much of his work. Morton Keller, The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast (1968), is very good and more balanced in interpretation. The short text in John Chalmers Vinson, Thomas Nast: Political Cartoonist (1967), tends toward the same laudatory tone as Paine but contains 120 pages of large reproductions of Nast's work.

Additional Sources

Paine, Albert Bigelow, Thomas Nast, his period and his pictures, New York: Chelsea House, 1980.

(1840-1902), political cartoonist. Nast may reasonably be judged the most powerful and influential political cartoonist that America has ever known. To a unique degree he both shaped and illuminated the political consciousness of his time. Nast's career was closely linked to the rise of illustrated magazines in the mid-nineteenth century. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, America's first successful pictorial magazine, appeared in 1855, and the teenaged Nast was one of its artists. Harper's Weekly, the vehicle for Nast's greatest work, followed in 1857.

His medium was the woodblock engraving. His first important drawings, dealing with the course and character of the Civil War, relied appropriately enough on somber, fluid tones of gray and black. After the war he turned to vigorous political commentary, with drawings notable for their clarity of line. Part of the impact of his works derived from their size: his Harper's cover drawings were nine by ten inches, his inside double-spread cartoons more than thirteen by twenty. But his real significance lay in what he had to say. As Daumier drew strength from his adversarial relationship to the France of the July Monarchy, so Nast gave pictorial form to the intense passions of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He was the great pictorialist (as Lincoln was the great wordsmith) of the crisis of nineteenth-century American nationalism.

Nast was born in Germany and brought to America in 1846. He came of age in antebellum New York City, part of a middlebrow literary-artistic community whose leitmotifs were romantic nationalism, classic liberalism, and antislavery. This was the worldview that gave form to Nast's brilliant comments on the great political drama of his time. During his peak productive years in the 1860s and 1870s, he created or popularized some of the most influential symbols of nineteenth-century American political life: the Tammany tiger, the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, the workingman with his cap and dinner pail, the Rag Baby of currency inflation. He also popularized the figure of Santa Claus as a round, cheery dispenser of gifts, exuding a gemütlichkeit that Nast drew from the folklore of his native land.

Nast's greatest work dealt with the politics and public policies of the post-Civil War decade. There is a notable correlation between the quality of his art and the force of personal conviction that lay behind it. When he commented on issues that stirred his liberal conscience--the struggle for the Union and against slavery, the plight of the freedmen during Reconstruction, the threat that Andrew Johnson and the Democrats posed to the war's results, the menace of the Tweed Ring, the danger (as he saw it) of Roman Catholicism to American mores and institutions--he did so with what has been called the "stark, focused style" of his artistic peak.

But his political commitments became muddied from the mid-1870s on, when postwar Radical Republicanism gave way to the scandals of the Grant administration, rising economic and social tensions, and a resurgent negrophobia. In pace with his growing disillusion, his art declined. He ended a pensioner of sorts, as the American consul in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he died of yellow fever.

Bibliography:

Morton Keller, The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast (1968); Albert B. Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures (1981).

Author:

Morton Keller

Thomas Nast
Self-portrait of Thomas Nast
Born	September 27, 1840(1840-09-27) Landau, Germany
Died	December 7, 1902 (aged 62) Guayaquil, Ecuador
Signature

Thomas Nast (September 27, 1840 – December 7, 1902) was a German-born American caricaturist and editorial cartoonist who is considered to be the "Father of the American Cartoon."^[1]

Contents 1 Youth and education 2 Career 2.1 Campaign against the Tweed Ring 2.2 Party politics 3 Notable works 4 Supposed origins of the word "Nasty" 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

Youth and education

Photograph of Nast by Sarony, Union Square, N.Y.

He was born in the barracks of Landau, Germany (in the Rhine Palatinate), the son of a trombonist in the 9th regiment Bavarian band. The elder Nast's socialist political convictions put him at odds with the German government, and in 1846 he left Landau, enlisting first on a French man-of-war and subsequently on an American ship.^[2] He sent his wife and children to New York City, and at the end of his enlistment in 1849 he joined them there. Thomas Nast's passion for drawing was apparent from an early age, and he was enrolled for about a year of study with Alfred Fredericks and Theodore Kaufmann and at the school of the National Academy of Design. After school (at the age of 15), he started working in 1855 as a draftsman for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper; three years afterwards for Harper's Weekly.

Career

Photograph of Nast taken between 1860 and 1875 by Mathew Brady or Levin Handy

Nast drew for Harper's Weekly from 1859 to 1860 and from 1862 until 1886. In February 1860 he went to England for the New York Illustrated News to depict one of the major sporting events of the era, the prize fight between the American John C. Heenan and the English Thomas Sayers.^[3] A few months later, as artist for The Illustrated London News, he joined Garibaldi in Italy. Nast's cartoons and articles about the Garibaldi military campaign to unify Italy captured the popular imagination in the U.S. In 1861, he married Sarah Edwards, whom he had met two years earlier.

His first serious works in caricature was the cartoon "Peace," (made in 1862) directed against those in the North who opposed the prosecution of the American Civil War. This and his other cartoons during the Civil War and Reconstruction days were published in Harper's Weekly. He was known for drawing battlefields in border and southern states. These attracted great attention, and Nast was called by President Abraham Lincoln "our best recruiting sergeant".^[4] Later, Nast strongly opposed President Andrew Johnson and his Reconstruction policy.

Campaign against the Tweed Ring

The "Brains"
Boss Tweed depicted by Thomas Nast in a wood engraving published in Harper's Weekly, October 21, 1871

A Group of Vultures Waiting for the Storm to "Blow Over" – "Let Us Prey."
The Tweed Ring depicted by Nast in a wood engraving published in Harper's Weekly, September 23, 1871

Nast's drawings were instrumental in the downfall of Boss Tweed, the powerful Tammany Hall leader. As commissioner of public works for New York City, Tweed led a ring that, by 1870, had gained total control of the city's government, and controlled "a working majority in the State Legislature".^[5] Tweed and his associates—Peter Barr Sweeny (park commissioner), Richard B. Connolly (controller of public expenditures), and Mayor A. Oakey Hall—defrauded the city of many millions of dollars by grossly inflating expenses paid to contractors connected to the Ring. Nast, whose cartoons attacking Tammany corruption had appeared occasionally since 1867, intensified his focus on the four principal players in 1870 and especially in 1871.

Tweed so feared Nast's campaign that an emissary was sent to offer Thomas Nast a large bribe, which was represented as a gift from a group of wealthy benefactors to enable Nast to study art in Europe.^[6] Feigning interest, Nast bid the initial offer of $100,000 dollars up to $500,000 before declaring, "I don't think I'll do it".^[7] Nast pressed his attack, and an indignant public rose against the Ring, which was removed from power in the election of November 7, 1871. Tweed was arrested in 1873 and convicted of fraud. When Tweed attempted to escape justice in December 1875 by fleeing to Cuba and from there to Spain, officials in Vigo, Spain were able to identify the fugitive by using one of Nast's cartoons.^[8]

Nast believed that the well-organized Irish immigrant communities in New York had provided the basis for Tweed's popular support. Because of this—along with Nast's Anti-Catholic and Nativist beliefs—Nast often portrayed the Irish immigrant community, and Catholic Church leaders, with extreme prejudice. In 1871, one of his works, titled "The American River Ganges", infamously portrayed Catholic bishops as crocodiles waiting to attack American school children. Nast's anti-Irish sentiment is apparent in his characteristic depiction of the Irish as violent drunks, often with ape-like features.

The American River Ganges, a cartoon by Thomas Nast showing bishops attacking public schools, with connivance of Boss Tweed and his associates. Published in Harper's Weekly, September 30, 1871.

The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things, a cartoon by Thomas Nast depicting a drunken Irishman lighting a powder keg. Published in Harper's Weekly, September 2, 1871.

In general, his political cartoons supported American Indians, Chinese Americans and advocated abolition of slavery. Nast also dealt with segregation and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, which was detailed in one of his more famous cartoons called "Worse than Slavery", which showed a despondent black family having their house destroyed by arson, and two members of the Ku Klux Klan and White League are shaking hands in their mutually destructive work against black Americans. His cartoons frequently had numerous sidebars and panels with intricate subplots to the main cartoon. A Sunday feature could provide hours of entertainment and highlight social causes. His signature "Tammany Tiger" has been emulated by many cartoonists over the years, and he introduced into American cartoons the practice of modernizing scenes from Shakespeare for a political purpose.

The Tammany Tiger Loose—"What are you going to do about it?", published in Harper's Weekly in November 1871, just before election day

Party politics

Harper's Weekly, and Nast, played an important role in the election of Ulysses Grant in 1868 and 1872; in the latter campaign, Nast's ridicule of Horace Greeley's candidacy was especially merciless. Nast became a close friend of President Grant and the two families shared regular dinners until Grant's death. Nast encouraged the former president's efforts in writing his autobiography while battling cancer.

He moved to Morristown, New Jersey in 1872 and lived there for many years. In 1873, Nast toured the United States as a lecturer and a sketch-artist, as he would do again in 1885 and 1887.

He shared political views with his friend Mark Twain and was for many years a staunch Republican. Nast opposed inflation of the currency, notably with his famous rag-baby cartoons, and he played an important part in securing Rutherford B. Hayes’ presidential election in 1876. Hayes later remarked that Nast was "the most powerful, single-handed aid [he] had",^[9] but Nast quickly became disillusioned with President Hayes, whose policy of Southern pacification he opposed. He was not given free rein to attack Hayes in Harper's, however; with the death of Fletcher Harper in 1877, Nast lost an important champion at the journal, and his contributions became less frequent. He focused on oil paintings and book illustrations, but these are comparatively unimportant.^{[citation needed]}

Interior Secretary Schurz cleaning house, Harper's Weekly, January 26, 1878

In 1884, his advocacy of civil service reform and his distrust of James G. Blaine, the Republican presidential candidate, forced him to become a Mugwump, whose support of Grover Cleveland helped him to win election as the first Democratic president since 1856. In the words of the artist's grandson, Thomas Nast St Hill, "it was generally conceded that Nast's support won Cleveland the small margin by which he was elected. In this his last national political campaign, Nast had, in fact, 'made a president.'"^[10] Nevertheless, Nast's tenure at Harper's Weekly ended with his Christmas illustration of December 1886. In the words of journalist Henry Watterson, "in quitting Harper's Weekly, Nast lost his forum: in losing him, Harper's Weekly lost its political importance."^[11]

portrait of Thomas Nast from Harpers Weekly, 1867

In 1890, he published Thomas Nast's Christmas Drawings for the Human Race. He contributed cartoons in various publications, notably the Illustrated American, but with the advent of new methods and younger blood his vogue was passed. In 1892, he took control of a failing magazine, the New York Gazette, and renamed it Nast's Weekly. Now returned to the Republican fold, Nast used the Weekly as a vehicle for his cartoons supporting Benjamin Harrison for president, but the magazine had little impact and ceased publication shortly after Harrison's defeat.^[12]

In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt appointed him as the United States' Consul General to Guayaquil, Ecuador in South America. During a deadly yellow fever outbreak, Nast stayed to the end helping numerous diplomatic missions and businesses escape the contagion. At age 62, in 1902, he died of yellow fever contracted there. His body was returned to the United States where he was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.

Notable works

Nast's Santa Claus on the cover of the January 3, 1863, issue of Harper's Weekly.

Nast's depiction of iconic characters, such as Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, are widely credited with giving us the recognized versions we see today.

• A classic version of Santa Claus, drawn in 1863 for Harper's Weekly. Before then, most depictions of Santa Claus showed a tall, thin man. Nast drew him as the bearded, plump man known today.
• Republican Party elephant
• Democratic Party donkey
• Tammany Hall tiger, a symbol of Boss Tweed's political machine
• Columbia, a graceful image of the Americas as a woman, usually in flowing gown and tiara, carrying a sword to defend the downtrodden.
• Uncle Sam, a lanky image of the United States (first drawn in the 1830s; Nast and John Tenniel added the goatee).
• John Confucius, a variation of John Chinaman, a traditional caricature of a Chinese Immigrant.
• The Fight at Dame Europa's School, 1871

Supposed origins of the word "Nasty"

There is a misconception among some that the word "nasty" originated from Thomas Nast's name, due to the tone of his cartoons.^[13] However, the word "nasty" has origins hundreds of years before Thomas Nast was born.^[14]

Notes

1. ^ "The Historic Elephant and Donkey; It Was Thomas Nast "Father of the American Cartoon," Who Brought Them Into Politics." (PDF). New York Times. 08/02/1908. p. SM9. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9D07EFDB113EE033A25751C0A96E9C946997D6CF&oref=slogin. Retrieved 2008-07-12. 
2. ^ Paine 1974, p. 7.
3. ^ Paine 1974, p. 36.
4. ^ Paine 1974, p.69.
5. ^ Paine 1974, p. 140.
6. ^ Paine 1974, p. 181.
7. ^ Paine 1974, pp. 181–182.
8. ^ Paine 1974, pp. 336–337.
9. ^ Paine 1974, p. 349.
10. ^ Nast & St. Hill 1974, p. 33.
11. ^ Paine 1974, p. 528.
12. ^ Paine 1974, p. 540.
13. ^ About.com
14. ^ Harper, Douglas (November 2001). "nasty etymology". Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=nasty. Retrieved 2009-02-01. 

References

Thomas Nast asks pardon for his sketches.

• Nast, T., & St. Hill, T. N. (1974). Thomas Nast: Cartoons and Illustrations. New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-23067-8
• Paine Albert Bigelow (1904). Th. Nast: His Period And His Pictures. New York: The MacMillan Company.  ISBN 087861-079-0
•  "Nast, Thomas". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Thomas Nast

• ThomasNast.com
• Thomas Nast Civil War Pictures
• Thomas Nast Caricatures of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Santa Claus, Napoleon, Catholicism, Boss Tweed, Tammany Hall and more.
• Cartoons of Thomas Nast: Reconstruction, Chinese Immigration, Native Americans, Gilded Era
•  "Nast, Thomas". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900. 
•  "Nast, Thomas". The New Student's Reference Work. Chicago: F. E. Compton and Co.. 1914. 
• Thomas Nast at Find a Grave

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