Nast, Thomas

Personal

Born September 26, 1840, in Landau, Germany; immigrated to United States, 1846; died of yellow fever, December 7, 1902, in Guayaquil, Ecuador; son of Joseph Thomas (a musician) and Apollonia (Apers) Nast; married Sallie Edwards, September 26, 1861; children: Julia, Thomas Jr., Edith, Mabel, Cyril. Education: Attended National Academy of Design.

Career

Illustrator and writer. Staff artist at Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, 1855-59, and Harper's Weekly, 1862-86; publisher of Nast's Weekly, 1892-93; U.S. consul general in Guayaquil, Ecuador, 1902.

Member

Regiment Veteran Club, Union League, Players.

Awards, Honors

Honors, Union League Club of New York City, for services to Federal cause.

Writings

COLLECTIONS

Nast's Illustrated Almanac, 1871-1875, Volume 1, McLoughlin (New York, NY), 1870, Volumes 2-5, Harper (New York, NY), 1871-74.

Christmas Drawings for the Human Race, Harper (New York, NY), 1890, published as Thomas Nast's Christmas Drawings for the Human Race, Dover (New York, NY), 1978.

Cartoons and Illustrations of Thomas Nast, Dover (New York, NY), 1974.

The main collections of Thomas Nast's works, papers, scrapbooks, and memorabilia are housed in two institutions in the artist's adopted city of Morristown, New Jersey: the MacCulloch Hall Historical Museum and the Joint Free Public Library of Morristown/Morris Township. The Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremount, OH, houses a collection of notes, photocopies, and sale catalogues related to Nast. Several of Nast's original cartoons are located in the Peter Mayo Collection at the State Historical Society in Columbia, Missouri.

ILLUSTRATOR

Alice B. Haven, Loss and Gain; or, Margaret's Home, Appleton (New York, NY), 1860.

Amusing Stories for Young Folks, Cyrus G. Cooke (Boston, MA), 1861.

Evert Augustus Duyckinck, National History of the War for the Union: Civil, Military and Naval, three volumes, Johnson, Fry (New York, NY), 1861-65.

John Williamson Palmer, editor, Folk Songs, Scribner (New York, NY), 1861.

Clement C. Moore, A Visit from St. Nicholas, L. Prang, 1864.

Frank Booth Goodrich, The Tribute Book: A Record of the Munificence, Self-Sacrifice, and Patriotism of the American People during the War for the Union, Derby & Miller (New York, NY), 1865.

Sophie May, Dotty Dimple, Lee & Shepard (Boston, MA), 1865.

Mary Mapes Dodge, Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates, James O'Kane (New York, NY), 1865.

Richard Edwards, Analytical First Reader, Taintor Bros. (New York, NY), 1866.

Warren Lee Goss, The Soldier's Story of His Captivity at Andersonville, Belle Isle, and Other Rebel Prisons, Lee & Shepard (Boston, MA), 1866.

George F. Harrington, Inside: A Chronicle of Secession, Harper (New York, NY), 1866.

Charles Dickens, Dickens' Christmas Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, McLoughlin (New York, NY), 1867.

Petroleum V. Nasby, Swinging Round the Cirkle, Lee & Shepard (Boston, MA), 1867.

William Douglas O'Connor, The Ghost, Putnam (New York, NY), 1867.

Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Hurd & Houghton (New York, NY), 1868.

Sophie May, Dotty Dimple at Home, Lee & Shepard (Boston, MA), 1868.

Petroleum V. Nasby, Ekkoes from Kentucky . . . : Being a Perfect Record uv the Ups, Downs, and Experiences uv the Dimocrisy, Lee & Shepard (Boston, MA), 1868.

Oliver Optic, Our Standard Bearer; or, The Life of General Ulysses S. Grant, Lee & Shepard (Boston, MA), 1868.

William Winter, Wonderful Adventures of Humpty Dumpty, McLoughlin (New York, NY), 1868.

The Story of Yankee Doodle Dandy, McLoughlin (New York, NY), 1869.

George P. Webster, Rip Van Winkle, McLoughlin (New York, NY), 1869.

William Swinton, History of the Seventh Regiment, National Guard, State of New York, During the War of the Rebellion, Fields, Osgood (New York, NY), 1870.

George P. Webster, Santa Claus and His Works, McLoughlin (New York, NY), 1870.

Charles Henry Pullen, The Fight at Dame Europa's School, Francis B. Felt (New York, NY), 1871.

Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pick-wick Club, Harper (New York, NY), 1873.

Vieux Moustache, Boarding-School Days, Hurd & Houghton (New York, NY), 1873.

Josh Billings, Everybody's Friend; or, Josh Billings' Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor, American Publishing (Hartford, CT), 1874.

Henry W. Shaw, Josh Billings: His Works Complete, G. W. Charleton (New York, NY), 1876.

David Ames Wells, Robinson Crusoe's Money; or, Remarkable Financial Fortunes of Remote Island Community, Harper (New York, NY), 1876.

(With Arthur B. Frost) Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, Sketches by Boz, and American Notes, Harper (New York, NY), 1877.

Pictorial War Record, Volume 1, Stearns (New York, NY), c. 1881.

Charles Carleton Coffin, The Boys of '61; or, Four Years of Fighting, Estes & Lauriat (Boston, MA), 1882.

Frederick Saunders, Salad for the Solitary and the Social, Robert Bentley (London, England), 1885, Thomas Whittaker (New York, NY), 1886.

Grover Cleveland, The President's Message: 1887, Putnam (New York, NY), 1888.

Rufus E. Shapley, Solid for Mulhooly: A Political Satire, Gebbie (Philadelphia, PA), 1889.

Edgar Fawcett, A New York Family, Cassell, 1891.

Marcus Wright, editor, Official and Illustrated War Record, [Washington, DC], 1899.

The Stock Exchange in Caricature, Volume 1, Abram Stone (New York, NY), 1904.

Betty Chancellor, A Child's Christmas Cookbook, Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO), 1964.

Also illustrator of other volumes. Contributor to periodicals, including Vanity Fair, London Illustrated News, New York Illustrated News, Riverside, Harper's Young People, Collier's, Phunny Phellow, Time, New York Recorder, and Insurance Observer.

Sidelights

Thomas Nast was one of America's most significant illustrators. He was staggeringly prolific and popular from the Civil War to the turn of the century, and he wielded enormous influence in those years. "Thomas Nast," wrote Richard Calhoun in Contemporary Graphic Artists, "towers over the history of American cartooning as no other artist does." Felicia A. Piscitelli, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, likewise expressed high regard for Nast's achievements. "Regarded as America's greatest caricaturist," wrote Piscitelli, "Nast's more than three thousand cartoons and illustrations brought freshness and originality as well as political relevance to the American art scene." Nast is credited with creating the popular conceptions of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, and with inventing the donkey and elephant as the symbols for the Democrat and Republican Parties. He is also credited with helping to bring down the corrupt New York politician Boss Tweed.

Nast was born in Landau, Germany, in 1840. Piscitelli recounted: "His family was imbued with the liberal, anticlerical, romantic, and nationalistic attitudes prevalent in Germany during much of the nineteenth century. Apparently Nast's father, a trombonist with the Ninth Regiment Bavarian Band, was outspoken in his political opinions and decided that America would provide a better environment for his family. Nast, his mother, and an older sister named Caterina immigrated to the United States in 1846 and settled in New York City; his father finished his term of service and arrived in 1850. At first young Nast did not speak any English, so he attended schools where German was an accepted language." By all accounts the family made a comfortable home in their adopted land; the elder Nast found work as a musician with the city's Philharmonic Society and the younger grew up much like any other city-bred boy. The only reported discord in the home was Nast's disinterest in school work. Despite a parental wish that he study music or learn some practical trade, young Tom's consuming passion was drawing, a passion to which he held with such firmness that he was at length permitted to take private lessons with Theodor Kaufmann, another German emigre whose specialty was historical painting. Later Nast enrolled at the Academy of Design, where he studied under Alfred Frederickson. In addition to these formal studies, Nast also spent much of his spare time studying and copying such classic works as were available in the city's museums and private galleries.

Finds Work as a Newspaper Illustrator

Nast's original aspiration was to become an orthodox academic painter of symbolic historical scenes. But he also apparently felt some pressure to demonstrate to his skeptical parents that his studies did have some practical value. Thus, at age fifteen he walked into the office of the recently launched Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and asked the proprietor for a job as an illustrator. Henry Carter thought to discourage the lad by sending him out to sketch a crowd scene; but so impressive was the result of this commission that he ended by hiring the boy at a salary of four dollars per week and Nast began his apprenticeship with Leslie's. According to Piscitelli, Nast's years at Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly constituted "a paid apprenticeship in the field of pictorial journalism."

During a tour of Europe, Nast produced popular illustrations of Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi's conflict with Sicilian rulers. "This was Garibaldi's most crucial campaign in forming a united kingdom of Italy under Victor Emmanuel II, proclaimed in 1861 after Nast had returned to the United States," Piscitelli maintained. Nast was covering political events upon his arrival home. "On 19 February 1861, only days after his return to America, Nast covered the reception of newly elected President Abraham Lincoln in New York and went on to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., for the inauguration," Piscitelli wrote. On September 26, 1861, Nast married Sarah Edwards. The couple were to have five children together.

In 1862 Nast began producing Civil War illustrations for the Unionist Harper's Weekly. When editor Fletcher Harper hired the twenty-two-year-old Nast, it was plain the magazine was getting a highly competent technical artist with the proven ability to produce quality work under the pressure of weekly deadlines. The astute publisher also discerned in the young man's work a singular ability to convey ideas and emotions, a degree of visual eloquence lacking in the work of more conventional illustrators. A partisan of great energy and force himself, Harper had not mistaken his man. With the publisher's encouragement and America's most widely read periodical for a forum, Nast lost little time in proving himself as ardent and effective a partisan as his employer. During the darkest years of the Civil War he roused an increasingly war-weary northern population again and again by his unprecedented ability to infuse the abstract ideal of Unionism with emotional urgency. His use of allegorical figures and images the weeping widow of the North, the cat o' nine tails for the South and melodramatic tableaux, created as much from his own intense convictions as from reality, moved President Abraham Lincoln to refer to Nast as "our best recruiting sergeant." There is little disagreement among historians that Nast's savage assaults on the Democratic Party's "Peace" campaign of 1864 so effectively labeled General McClellan's candidacy as cowardly as to play an important role in turning the election narrowly in Lincoln's favor.

By the war's end, Nast had honed the instincts of the editorial cartoonist to razor sharpness—a sharpness he continued to employ to good effect between 1866 and 1868 against Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson. Nast regarded Johnson as inexcusably soft on the defeated South. During this period Nast also experimented with painting and book illustration. These genres helped him to perfect his incisive linear style, gave him invaluable training in portraiture, and taught him how to condense complex ideas into single dramatic pictures.

Takes on the Corrupt Tweed Ring

In 1870 Nast undertook what Calhoun called "the crusade that has been called arguably the greatest sustained outpouring of effective, high quality political caricature in the history of editorial cartooning." Nast's crusade was directed against New York City's powerful "Tweed Ring," a group of four corrupt Democrat politicians. Part of New York's Tammany Hall political machine, these politicians had taken an already corrupt system specializing in buying votes, giving overpaid city jobs to their friends, charging exorbitant rents for public housing, and naturalizing immigrants for cash and took it to new levels of municipal thievery. Nast created savagely memorable caricatures of Mayor A. Oakley Hall (or as Nast often spelled it, "Haul"), Comptroller Richard ("Slippery Dick") Connolly, Peter B. ("Brains") Sweeny, and above all William Marcy ("Boss") Tweed. Fusing genuine personal outrage with a slashing, vigorous style, the artist turned Tweed, with his vast paunch and broad, bearded face dominated by a pair of small, avaricious eyes, into an almost universal personification of the bloated, grasping politician, while portraying the fashionable, bespectacled Mayor Hall as the ideal front man, busily plying a broom in a burlesque of cleanliness while his Tweed Ring cohorts plotted some new atrocity against the city treasury.

Allegedly offered a bribe of a half million dollars, which he indignantly spurned, then threatened with bodily harm, whereupon he moved his family to New Jersey, Nast responded by escalating his attacks, particularly after the New York Times began publishing detailed accounts of the various frauds perpetrated by Tweed and his gang. Among the classic Nast drawings from this time are "Who Stole the People's Money? T'Was Him," in which the four Tweed Ring members are standing in a circle, each one pointing to the member on his right, "It Will All Blow Over Let Us Prey," in which the four politicians, depicted as vultures, are cowering on a mountainous cliff as a storm gathers overhead, and "The Tammany Tiger Loose What Are You Going to Do about It?," in which Boss Tweed, dressed as an ancient Roman Caesar, directs his tiger to tear apart the figure of New York in the Coliseum. While Boss Tweed was untroubled by the printed exposes of his massive corruption, claiming that "my constituents can't read," he despised Nast's "damned pictures" because even his illiterate supporters could understand their message. By reducing Tweed and his cronies to figures of ridicule, Nast's cartoons robbed them of the dignity of their offices, and once it became possible to laugh at them, their power, based on an image of arrogant invincibility, could be broken. The 1871 municipal elections, in which the Tweed Ring was contested by a group of reform candidates, turned the Tammany machine out of office; Tweed was later prosecuted on fraud charges. Oddly enough Nast was also instrumental in keeping Tweed in jail. When Tweed broke out and fled to Spain in 1876, the authorities there identified him from a Nast caricature supplied by the U.S. consulate, who did not have a photograph of the fugitive available.

As brilliantly vitriolic as his anti-Ring drawings were, Nast eclipsed even that standard in his 1872 crusade against the "Liberal Republican" presidential candidacy of New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley, whom he regarded as too lenient in his attitude toward the defeated South and very much an opportunistic latecomer to the anti-Ring crusade. Greeley, with his floppy hat, round spectacles, long coattails, ceaseless activity, and voluminous opinions, was a target tailor-made for Nast's parody. Nast depicted a wheedling, sweating, desperate Greeley clasping hands with anyone who could help him win election, including the Ku Klux Klan, Boss Tweed, the Roman Catholic Church (one of Nast's perennial enemies), John Wilkes Booth, and Satan himself.

Literally every detail of these drawings told against their hapless victim, but perhaps the cleverest stroke of all was Nast's treatment of Greeley's running mate, the aptly named B. Gratz Brown of Missouri. Unable to find a photograph of Brown to caricature, Nast hit upon the brilliantly expedient idea of turning the vice presidential candidate into a name tag, "& Gratz Brown," and fastening the tag to Greeley's coattails as a kind of afterthought. Often the tag was partially obscured, sometimes the "z" in Gratz was childishly reversed, and on one occasion when Greeley was presented as a small, bespectacled mouse, the tiny rodent's tail was inscribed with Brown's name. As Nast's grandson remarked of this inspired bit of ridicule: "One can almost hear people asking 'Gratz who?'" It was later suggested that the savagery of Nast's attacks contributed to Greeley's death shortly after the failed campaign and, despite the implausible nature of the charge, that it could even be suggested shows how devastating Nast's cartoons were felt to be.

The 1870s found Nast at his most effective. His inventiveness, his mastery of the woodblock technique, and his partisan passions were all at their zenith. During this period he invented the Democrat donkey (during the 1874 election) and Republican elephant (1877) symbols. "No American election since Nast's lifetime would be complete without the Republican elephant and Democratic donkey symbols the artist created," as Piscitelli maintained. He also created the popular image of Uncle Sam during this time. Nast was a strong supporter of General Ulysses S. Grant for president in 1868 and 1872. "Grant was said to have credited his election in large part to General Sheridan's sword and Nast's cartoons," according to Piscitelli.

The death of Fletcher Harper in 1877 hit Nast hard. Harper had been his strongest supporter at Harper's Weekly. The new editors wanted firmer control over his artwork. Nor were changes in staff his only worry. In 1880 Harper's went from the woodblock engravure reproduction technique (of which Nast was an acknowledged master) to a photochemical process which required him to execute his originals in pen and ink. This had a noticeably adverse impact on his work; the bold line and elaborate crosshatching gave way to the comparatively weak and faded productions of a man no longer in command of his craft.

The Creation of Santa Claus

In 1864, Nast had illustrated Clement Clarke Moore's famous holiday poem The Night Before Christmas. In addition, every December, he produced Christmas illustrations for Harper's Weekly. In these works, he popularized a conception of Santa Claus as a chubby, bearded, jolly fellow with a home at the North Pole and a sleigh drawn by a team of reindeer. Based on traditional German and Dutch stories of the famous character, Nast's version made the character familiar to millions of American children. According to Piscitelli, "A generation of readers looked forward to the Christmas issues of Harper's Weekly, and many people collected them. These endearing illustrations reveal a gentler side of Nast than his political cartoons. In them he indulged his childlike love of home, family, and Yule-tide celebration. Moore had made Saint Nicholas a pipe-smoking, 'jolly old elf'; evidently under Dutch influence his name became Santa Claus. It was Nast, however, who gave the fat, fun-loving, generous saint his modern form, making a home for him at the North Pole, which was far enough away to be almost imaginary and, incidentally, politically neutral. The children in the pictures were modeled after those of the artist, and the fireplace decorated with images from Mother Goose rhymes was an actual fixture in Nast's home in Morristown, New Jersey. The appearance of nursery rhymes in some of the Christmas drawings, while apt, was an apparent coincidence; both Mother Goose and Santa Claus inhabit the worlds of childhood and fantasy. It is curious that Nast's plump, bearded, and smiling Santa Claus looks like the good-natured artist himself in his later portraits."

To overcome his financial difficulties, Nast in 1892 formed his own publication, Nast's Weekly, but that publication lasted only until the next year. He tried his hand at paintings on Civil War themes, but they did not generate enough revenue to pay off his debt. Nearly a decade later, still wallowing in financial turmoil, Nast accepted President Theodore Roosevelt's generous offer of a consulate position in Ecuador. That commission enabled Nast to resolve his financial difficulties, but it also resulted in his death. He arrived in Ecuador on July 1, 1902, soon caught yellow fever, and died on December 7th at the age of sixty-two.

If you enjoy the works of Thomas Nast

If you enjoy the works of Thomas Nast, you might want to check out the following books:

Roger A. Fischer, Them Damn Pictures: Explorations in American Political Cartoon Art, 1996.

Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop, Drawn and Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons, 1996.

Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art: 1835-1878, 1996.

Although Nast's reputation had declined somewhat in the years preceding his death, he has since come to be regarded as the leading American illustrator of his time, and images such as Uncle Sam, Santa Claus, and the Republican and Democrat symbols remain prominent features in American life. In 1986, the Thomas Nast Society was founded in Morristown, New Jersey, Nast's long-time home, by the MacCulloch Hall Historical Museum and the Joint Free Public Library of Morristown/Morris Township. The Society publishes the annual Journal of the Thomas Nast Society, the semiannual newsletter, The Nasthead, preserves examples of Nast's work, and provides a forum for scholars studying Nast's career. His house in Morristown, New Jersey, has been declared a national historic landmark, and in 1956 the U.S. government placed a plaque commemorating Thomas Nast in the barracks in Landau-Pfalz, Germany, the city where he was born.

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Contemporary Graphic Artists, Volume 1, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 188: American Book and Magazine Illustrators to 1920, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Hoff, Syd, Boss Tweed and the Man Who Drew Him, Coward (New York, NY), 1978.

Keller, Morton, The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1968.

Murrell, William A., A History of American Graphic Humor, Macmillan for the Whitney Museum of Art (New York, NY), Volume 1, 1933, Volume 2, 1938.

Paine, Albert Bigelow, Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1906, reprinted, Chelsea House (New York, NY), 1981.

Vinson, John C., Thomas Nast, Political Cartoonist, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1967.

PERIODICALS

American Artist, December, 1974, pp. 56-57.

American Art Journal, spring, 1972, Albert Boime, "Thomas Nast and French Art," pp. 43-65; Volume 19, 1987, Wendy Wiek Reaves, "Thomas Nast and the President," pp. 60-71.

American Heritage, Volume 22, Number 6, 1971, Thomas Nast St. Hill, "His Grandson Recalls the Life and Death of Thomas Nast," pp. 81-96.

American Opinion, February, 1977.

Choice, November, 1974.

Hayes Historical Journal, Number 8, 1989, "Thomas Nast in the Age of Grant," pp. 52-60.

Journal of the Thomas Nast Society, 1986—.

New York Historical Society Quarterly, Number 49, 1965, Alexander B. Callow, Jr., "What Are You Going to Do about It?: The Crusade against the Tweed Ring," pp. 117-142.

Observer, December 15, 1974.

Scholastic Update, October 4, 1996.*