Thurber Thursday: Thurber’s Framed Art

I was looking very carefully through a later edition of Thurber’s must-have collection, The Seal In The Bedroom, when I realized my eyes kept focusing on the wall art that appears in so many of his single panel drawings. If there’s one element of Thurber’s art that I’ve consciously used in my own work over the years, it is the hanging framed piece. I don’t mean I copy Thurber, but I “hang” pieces in my cartoon rooms with Thurber on my brain. 

I thought it would be fun to look at a half dozen or so of his framed pieces. At least one of them, for me, ranks as a classic miniature.

[In all of the captions below, I’m using punctuation, and upper and lower case letters as they appear in the book]

We’ll begin with the fab miniature. It’s found on the wall behind a drawing of two women sitting on a sofa, with the caption, “I Yielded, Yes — but I never led your husband on, Mrs. Fisher!”

Q:What’s better than one Thurber dog?

A: Six Thurber dogs.

I believe there’s a print hanging in The Thurber House of a bunch of dogs (sorry, I don’t remember the artist). My sketchy memory is that the Thurber House folks thought perhaps the print may have been inspirational to the teenaged Thurber (someone please correct me if I’m off on this). 

Below is one that appears on the wall of a drawing with a man, and two women, with the caption, “A Penny For Your Thoughts, Mr. Griscom”

Thurber used a similar framed piece in several other drawings not shown in this collection. Sometimes there’s a single sailboat; he repeated the caption in five other drawings in this collection — each ending with a different surname].

Here are two appearing on the same wall in the drawing of a reclined woman speaking to a standing man. The ocean liner on a rough sea is so great, as is the landscape with partially obscured building (I believe we’ve seen this building before). These two pieces appear in the drawing captioned, “Hello, Dear! — How’s everything in the Marts of Trade?”

A trio from the wall of a drawing of two women seated in chairs: “I Don’t Know. George Got It Somewhere.”  “It” is a penguin. One of my top 20 fave Thurber drawings of all time. I left some part of the drawing in so you could see how Thurber arranged the pieces on the wall. Another ocean liner — this time on calm water. I love the end pieces: the dancing(?) woman and the sunrise or sunset. 

And finally, this fairly complicated drawing that appears on the wall of a drawing with some elf-like people along with two men and a woman, with the caption: “He Claims Something Keeps Following Him, Doctor”

Seeing  these framed pieces, (mostly) isolated, reminds me of what my attraction to them was in the first place. These are extra little cartoon worlds — bonus worlds — Thurber has given us. We may only give them a half-glance, but for that brief moment we are not in a Thurber living room, but off to sea, or in a yard playing ball, or contemplating a half dozen Thurber dogs (and how wonderful is that!).