Harrison Cady

read-em-again asked: Hi, I hope you can help me out. I've spent several hours scouring you impressive collection of illustrations, but didn't find any info on a Cady print, The School of the Wildwood, that I have. Image size is about 8.5" x 13.5". It appears to be a b/w lithograph with hand-color, but it may be a color print. It is matted and framed; Cady has inscribed the mat to 2 children and signed it in the lower right corner. Can you provide any info about the date or source of the print? Thanks, Kurt

Hi Kurt, I’m sorry that I can’t help you. I don’t know of the image you describe; I bet it was post-1922 and out of the public domain. (I admire your fortitude in slogging through the thousands of illustrations on the site!—I wish the Tumblr search function actually worked…)

Best, Peter

Welcome to the Harrison Cady Tumblog

This blog has, at least in the short term, completed its mission of collecting Harrison Cady’s public domain work and presenting it to the public. New visitors to this blog are advised to make use of Tumblr’s “archive” and “random” tools to get a sense of what is here (literally, thousands of drawings).

The main holes in the collection remain Cady’s American Boy and Comfort work. At some point I will see if I can get additional images to provide a better sense of Cady’s work in those publications.

Meanwhile, I highly encourage the Harrison Cady fan to find a copy of Donald Phelps’ Reading the Funnies, which contains an extensive, erudite critical appraisal of Cady as an important (second-tier) American artist. O Rare Harrison Cady, available from the Sandy Bay Historical Society in Rockport, MA, will fill in the biographical details. And The Rosebud Archives’s Kids at Play: The Birds-eye Views of Harrison Cady, offers 29 large high resolution prints of Cady work.

Finally, I remain ever grateful to Michael Dowhan and Wayne Wright, who did the bibliographical labor that made this project possible.

Harrison Cady, Boys’ Life, January 1939. Cover.

Harrison Cady, Boys’ Life, July 1938. Cover.

Harrison Cady, Boys’ Life,  June 1937. Cover and editorial about Cady.

Harrison Cady, Boys’ Life, August 1936. Cover.

Harrison Cady, Boys’ Life, December 1930. Cover.

Harrison Cady, Boys’ Life, July 1929. Cover.

Harrison Cady’s post-public domain work

Harrison Cady remained an active illustrator and cartoonist for the rest of his life. He drew “Peter Rabbit” as a Sunday strip until 1948. His collaborations with Thornton Burgess ended in 1960.

Cady’s post-1922 contributions to the world of magazines included American Boy (until 1934), Boys’ Life (1929-1939), Child Life (1924-1937), Comfort (until 1933), Farm & Fireside (1923-1928), Life (until 1926), and People’s Home Journal (until 1929).

During this period, Cady also began to put more energy into the fine arts, and took up summer residency in the artists’ community of Rockport, MA. Examples of his landscape and portrait paintings are not difficult to find on auction sites throughout the web.

Because of copyright issues, I will not be directly posting post-1922 images on this blog. Google Books does offer full view copies of Boy’s’ Life, so I thought I would finish this blog (for now) by embedding some of Harrison Cady’s covers for that magazine.