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Show F. O. C. PARLEY "'"TU-J r. KI.MO SCOTT WATSON ON JUNE 2ii, 112 just 115 yoars nf:o there was born in Philadelphia boy who was destined to iy j beoonio not only "the first artist of his time" but WT nlso one of the most versatile geniuses with the J. pencil and brush that this country has ever known. liecause of that versatility, Americans of a later generation owe him a reat debt of gratitude. In the days when the art of photography was in its infancy, he made for them a pictorial record of contemporary contempo-rary American life and scenes of historical interest which are almost photographic in their fidelity to fact. Felix Octavius Carr Darley was his name and three-quarters three-quarters of a century ago the signature, "Darley," on a picture was familiar to more Americans than that of any other man. But with the passing years both the artist and the importance of his work have been forgotten and they are known only to the few who are interested in more than just the obvious facts of American history. Darley was the son of an English Eng-lish actor, named John Darley, who came to America soon after the close of the Revolution. The senior Darley intended to have his son seek a mercantile career and at the age of fourteen the boy was placed in a business house in Philadelphia. While employed em-ployed as a clerk, his talent for drawing became apparent and his fellow employes had many a hearty laugh at the caricatures which he drew of them and of his employer. Some of these caricatures attracted at-tracted the attention of the editor of the Saturday Museum who bought them, paying young Darley Dar-ley a larger sum for a few-sketches few-sketches that he had dashed off at odd moments than he could earn by a week's work as a clerk. Encouraged by his success, the "Leatherstocking," and had fixed in its mind a real concept of Cooper's "noble red man." Darley Dar-ley also prepared n set of skeches for Dickens' novels and caught the spirit of the English writer's immortal characters quite ns successfully as any English artist could have done. While carrying on this work of book illustration, Darley was also engaged by a number of illustrated illustrat-ed magazines and newspapers and within n short time the credit-line of "Drawings by F. O. C. Darley," or simply the name "Darley" on a picture, was as familiar to the reading public of that time as some of the well-known well-known trademarks are to readers read-ers of today. Next he was employed em-ployed by the United States government gov-ernment to make designs for government gov-ernment bonds and national banknotes bank-notes and they were also used on a great variety of commercial paper. If you will dig into that old trunk up in the attic some day and find old promissory notes, receipts, etc., which are embellished with steel engravings engrav-ings of Indians, symbolical figures, fig-ures, such as "Columbia" and the like, the chances are that you will be looking at pictures which were made from drawings by Felix Octavius Carr Darley. In addition to his outline drawings, draw-ings, Darley also produced a number of other works, some in Ichabod Crane's School. youthful artist determined to make this his life work. His first commission was to illustrate a number of humorous works for a Philadelphia publishing publish-ing house. Darley was a keen observer ob-server of human life and his aptness apt-ness in sketching humorous situations situ-ations and in telling jokes without words made him popular with the public who began watching for his drawings. In this respect he was the first of a school of distinctively American pictorial humorists which was to include such men as E. W Kemble, A. B. Frost, Oliver Herford and some of our modern cartoonists. "Ichabod Crane" Comes to Life. In 1843 Darley moved to New York and two years later the American Art Union invited him to illustrate Washington Irving's humorous writings. He prepared two sets of designs, one depicting the scenes in "Rip Van Winkle" and the other "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." In the latter America saw for the first time that scarecrow-like school teacher, teach-er, "Ichabod Crane," come to life and America was delighted with it. Darley'sdelineation of other oth-er characters in Irving's stories did much to increase interest in that author's work and although his illustrations were only outline out-line drawings they at once took the popular fancy and established estab-lished Darley's fame. In 1356 he made outline sketches for Hawthorne's novel, "The Scarlet Letter" and in the same year prepared similar illustrations il-lustrations for another romance of New England life, Sylvester Judd's "Margaret." One interesting interest-ing fact about these drawings is that he undertook them on his own responsibility, since the publishers had not ordered them, and therefore they possess more of the characteristics of the author's auth-or's genius than almost any of his other sketches. But even though the publishers of Hawthorne's and Judd's books had not ordered or-dered Darley's drawings, they were quickly accepted when he submitted them. Next Darley furnished more than 500 designs for the works of J. Fenimore Cooper and, as in the case of "Ichabod Crane," America saw for the first time a picture of that romantic hero, color and some in black and white, generally employing what is known as the aquarelle method in his work. He was one of the original members of the American Ameri-can Society of Painters in Water Colors and a member of the Artists Art-ists Fund Society of New York. In 1852 he became a member of the National Academy of Design. A Pictorial Historian. Of greatest interest to Americans Ameri-cans of a later generation are his pictures of historical scenes. In these he covered the whole sweep of American history from Colonial Co-lonial days down to his own time. One of his most famous pictures is that of the wedding procession as described in Longfellow's "The Courtship of Miles Stand-ish" Stand-ish" which appeared in 1359. Noteworthy, too, were his paintings paint-ings depicting scenes in the Revolution. Rev-olution. They included such pictures pic-tures as "The First Blow for Liberty,"- which shows a group of patriots firing from behind a stone wall at the British redcoats red-coats as they retreat from Lexington; Lex-ington; "Washington at the Battle Bat-tle of Monmouth"; and his stirring stir-ring "Wyoming Valley Massacre," Mas-sacre," showing an attack b y Iroquois Indians on settlers in New York and Pennsylvania during dur-ing those dreadful days, made memorable by the romances of Harold Frederic, Robert W. Chambers Cham-bers and Walter D. Edmonds. Better known, perhaps, than any of these Revolutionary war pictures are those which Darley made commemorating the hardships hard-ships and heroism of the emigrants emi-grants across the great plains of the West. Although idealized in some respects, yet it is probable prob-able that no other artist has come as near to depicting faithfully those days of the "covered wagon" wag-on" as did Darley. One of his pictures, "Emigrants Attacked by Indians," was among the four ordered by Prince Napoleon when Darley's reputation had spread across the sea and it is often reproduced in books dealing with life on the western frontier as typifying that romantic era in our history. The next period in history which engaged Darley's attention atten-tion was the Civil war and he made many pictures descriptive of its outstanding incidents. Of x,.. , ,.-x. r" :i c, ., !n . j , . ; ... . ----v. : " . Fmigrants Attacked by Indians on the Western Plains. (The original of this painting was purchased by Louis Napoleon, later Kmperor Napoleon HI of Trance.) course, by this time photography had been developed to such u state of perfection that it was possible to record, through the eye of the camera, history while it was happening. That is what Matthew Brady, the "first news cameraman," did from 13151 to 1SU5. But Brady could not be everywhere to photograph all the scenes worth preserving. Fortunately Fortun-ately for posterity, the pencil and brush of Felix Daley admirably supplemented Brady's camera in preserving for it a pictorial record rec-ord of that great conflict. Civil War Pictures. Most famous of all of Darley's Civil war pictures is his "Slier-man's "Slier-man's March to the Sea," steel engravings of which hung on the walls of so many American homes (in the North, of course!) until changing tastes in pictures-for-the-home relegated them to the attic. Nearly as famous as this picture was Darley's "Dahl-gren's "Dahl-gren's Cavalry Charge at Fredericksburg" Fred-ericksburg" which attracted universal uni-versal admiration when it was exhibited at the Paris exhibition in 1S67. Darley was already well known abroad by that time, for he had visited Furope in 1S64 and added largely to his stock of pictures. Many of these were published in book form in lSb3 under the title of "Sketches Abroad with Pen and Pencil." His water - color "Street Scene in Rome" was one of the outstanding canvases at the Centennial exposition in Philadelphia Phil-adelphia in 1876 which proved, for once at least, that a prophet is not without honor in his own country! But for all the fame that he won as a painter, Darley remained re-mained a great illustrator to the last. In 1885 he produced a notable not-able series of drawings to illustrate illus-trate Shakespeare's plays. Then two years later death stayed his hands. He died in Claymont, Del., on March 27, 1833. "Painting of scenes from common com-mon life is of late appearance in America," observes Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., in the chapter devoted to "Genre Painting before be-fore the Civil war" in the "The American Spirit in Art" (Yale University Press "Chronicles of America"), "The interest which our forefathers felt in themselves was not extended to their social and business ' relations. Apparently Appar-ently they were too busy doing, to observe themselves in action. Even the early illustrators, barring bar-ring a few political cartoonists, avoided genre at a moment when England and France were leaving the fullest and ablest records of their everyday affairs. . .The glo- again he was the only conceivable conceiv-able American illustrator of the broad humor and melodrama of Charles Dickens. Though later American illustrators have surpassed sur-passed him at certain points, he still remains the most universal illustrator we have produced. ". . . The slight but telling touch of antiquarianism is characteristic characteris-tic in Darley in historical illustration. illus-tration. His broader humor is well exemplified in the vignette for Whittier's 'Cobbler Keezar' published in 'New England Ballads' Bal-lads' in 1870. Such a thing looks simple and even obvious, but such simplicity rests upon the most thorough preparation, a s Darley's innumerable trial-drawings and sketchbook notes attest. "... He was eclipsad in his later years by the new generation genera-tion of illustrators, but in a larger sense he left no successors." Great as an illustrator and lithographer, lith-ographer, Darley had still another an-other claim to distinction, in that he "naturally turned his .--"- t-'T . C - -f The Dying Soldier The Last Letter From nome. ries of the style (in America) were not in painting at all but in the copious and always excellent illustration il-lustration of F. O. C. Darley." A Versatile Genius. And elsewhere in the same volume vol-ume are frequent references to this versatile genius, as for example: ex-ample: "For his albums of outlines after af-ter American authors, the famous illustrator, Felix O. C. Darley, employed lithography very successfully. suc-cessfully. His plates after Wash ington Irving's 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and after Judd's 'Margaret' are among the best tilings of the sort that the century produced anywhere." "... Through all this period lithography was serving a useful subartistic purpose. Books on geology and botany, needing color, col-or, were usually thus illustrated; so were scientific government reports re-ports and the books on the Indians. In-dians. But the results, while often of-ten excellent for their purpose, do not concern the student of art. For standard sets of American prose writers, notably Irving and Cooper, line-engraved illustration seemed indispensable. It was, however, generally limited to a frontispiece or title vignette. "Darley can be tragically dramatic, dra-matic, as in 'The Death of King Philip' for the Artists' Edition of Irving's 'Sketch Book' and! hand now and then to caricature. We find him in young Donald G. Mitchell's 'Lorgnette' gently satirizing sat-irizing New York's excessive lion-worship lion-worship of the Hungarian refugees ref-ugees of the revolution of 1848... This is near the head of a long line of caricature dealing with the visiting or immigrant foreigner. for-eigner. In due course the negro, the German, the Irishman and the Jew were to receive similar attention from our caricaturists." Western Newspaper Union. |