Beginnings Of Tilley In An Early Rea Irvin?
When comics scholar, Mike Rhode, sent me the below 1917 two-panel drawing by Rea Irvin (more information here on the drawing), my eyes immediately went to the the dancing top-hatted fellow in the second panel. Something very familiar about the waistcoat, the collar, and of course the hat. He’s not Eustace Tilley, but he’s well in the vicinity of Tilley. And this was eight years before the very first issue of The New Yorker hit the newsstands.
In his The Art Of The New Yorker: 1925-1995, the late Lee Lorenz (former New Yorker art editor, and later cartoon editor) provided Irvin’s Tilley lineage (p. 14-15). Lorenz noted that Irvin’s Tilley was “based on a sketch of the well-known dandy Comte d’Orsay. (It also strangely echoes the cover of a nineteenth-century humor magazine called The Chap-Book.)”
Along with those two drawings I think we can safely argue that Irvin’s dancing man was at the very least, a piece of the Eustace Tilley puzzle revealed in 1925.
— My thanks, as always, to Mike Rhode, for his contribution.
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Rea Irvin’s A-Z Spill Entry:
Rea Irvin (pictured above. Self portrait above from Meet the Artist) *Born, San Francisco, 1881; died in the Virgin Islands,1972. Irvin was the cover artist for the New Yorker’s first issue, February 21, 1925. He was the magazine’s first art and only art supervisor (some refer to him as its first art editor) holding the position from 1925 until 1939 when James Geraghty assumed the title of art editor. Irvin then became art director and remained in that position until William Shawn officially succeeded Harold Ross in early 1952. Irvin’s last original work for the magazine was the magazine’s cover of July 12, 1958. The February 21, 1925 Eustace Tilley cover had been reproduced every year on the magazine’s anniversary until 1994, when R. Crumb’s Tilley-inspired cover appeared. Tilley has since reappeared, with other artists substituting from time-to-time. Number of New Yorker covers (not including the repeat appearances of the first cover every anniversary up to 1991): 163. Number of cartoons contributed: 261.
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Podcast Of Interest: The Illustration Department‘s Conversation With Liza Donnelly
Liza Donnelly speaks with Giuseppe Castellano in this forty-six minute pod. Listen here!
Left: Ms. Donnelly sold this cartoon to The New Yorker in 1979 — her first “OK” — but it wasn’t published until the issue of November 22, 1982. Her first published New Yorker cartoon was a multi-panel drawing of a man petting a dog. It appeared in The New Yorker, June 21, 1982.
Visit Donnelly’s website here.