The Society Of Illustrators fab headquarters is the home of the largest Thurber drawing I’ve ever seen. Years ago, I saw some large Thurber originals lining the hallways of the Great Southern Hotel as part of a Thurber birthday celebration. If my memory is correct, they weren’t as big as the one at the Society.
Thanks to Anelle Miller, Executive Director at The Society Of Illustrators (thank you, Anelle, and thank you, SOI!), you can see what the piece looks like (I enthusiastically encourage you to go to The Society to see the real deal and all the other terrific art on their gallery walls):
Once upon a time it was in their bookshop — you couldn’t miss it as you entered the building. In recent times it’s migrated up the stairs.
Here’s the info on the drawing:
Edited by Shirley Cunningham
The framed piece is 3′ 5″ high and 4′ 3″ wide.
Here’s what The Pocket Entertainer cover looks like:
What brought on this thinking about the big Thurber drawing was a Warren Miller New Yorker original drawing I “won” for a song on Ebay the other day. The seller’s listing indicated he would not mail the piece (it was framed) and would only sell to someone willing to pick it up. Luckily, the seller lived out Woodstock way, about a half hour from me. At the seller’s home, the first words out of my mouth when I saw the drawing were: “Wow, it’s big.” The piece was crammed into a 14″ x 16″ frame, with the drawing itself taking up a lot of that space.
Here’s a photo showing a framed George Booth drawing resting (temporarily) on the Miller drawing. Booth’s drawing is 5″x 7″ in a 10″ x 13″ frame — about average for many of the originals in our collection. The Miller drawing just takes over its space (sorry about the reflection — Stieglitz I ain’t). Imagine how much wall space it would occupy if was framed with proper breathing room.
Thinking about other New Yorker artists who draw big, two Eds come readily to mind: Edward Koren, and Edward Sorel.
The first time I realized some of my New Yorker colleagues drew big, it was a bit of a shock. I’ve always drawn on 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper with the image floating in the center about 2/3rds the size of the Booth drawing shown here. Back in the late 1970s, when I walked into a gallery exhibit of Edward Koren’s work, the sight of his huge framed pieces knocked the cartoonist’s beret off my head. In a conversation with Ed, I asked him about drawing large. He told me, “I find I can get the detail I want – like in the eyes – if I’m drawing large.” We realized we both needed the same control, but both came to a very different way of getting there.
Warren Miller’s piece is a miniature compared to Ed Sorel originals. On his first visit to Spill headquarters, Ed asked to see my workspace. In those early years at our new home I had settled into the former laundry room, a narrow space perhaps five feet wide, and eight feet long. With my homemade desk (shiplap resting on some 2”x 4″s) and crude bookshelves, the actual workspace was cramped. There was just enough clear space on the desk surface for my stack of drawing paper. It was quite a sight to see Ed sit in my old wooden swivel chair, staring down at my stack of 8 1/2″ x 11″ bond paper. I could almost feel him wanting to sweep everything out of his way to give himself more space to work.
There are of course a number of other New Yorker artists who draw big: Peter Arno for instance, and a contemporary of his: Barbara Shermund. The Shermund originals we have are all large (one of the largest is 15″ x 18″). George Price drew big — our Price original, at 21″ x21″ is one of our largest framed pieces. The opposite of the biggest drawing we have in the house is the smallest: the drawing by Richard Decker shown here, temporarily sitting atop the Price. It measures 1 1/2″ x 1 3/4″.