W. W. DENSLOW, THE FIRST ILLUSTRATOR OF OZ

by Douglas G. Greene

Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1972), pgs. 7–15

Citations

Chicago 17th ed.:

Greene, Douglas G. “W. W. Denslow, the First Illustrator of Oz.” Baum Bugle 16, no. 2 (1972): 7–15.

MLA 9th ed.:

Greene, Douglas G. “W. W. Denslow, the First Illustrator of Oz.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 16, no. 2, 1972, pp. 7–15.

(Note: In print, this article included typos that have been reproduced here for consistency. However, words that were originally underlined have now been rendered in italics. Additionally, drawings and photographs originally accompanied the text, which have not been included here.)

W. W. Denslow was one of the most important American illustrators of children’s books of the early twentieth century. His influence and originality, however, have seldom been recognized primarily because, except for L. Frank Baum, he worked with mediocre authors whose books have been forgotten. Only one book illustrated by Denslow, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is currently available and, for the most part, the pictures are no longer well or accurately reproduced. Although Denslow’s work is significant to those interested in Baum and in American illustration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, little has been written about his life and artistic development. The most valuable article about Denslow is Russell P. MacFall’s “Hippocampus Den” (The Baum Bugle, Autumn 1963), but since the appearance of that brief study, much new material has been unearthed and the story of Denslow’s career can now be told more fully.

William Wallace Denslow, the son of William Wallace and Jane Eva Denslow, was born May 5, 1856 in Philadelphia, the year that L. Frank Baum was born in Chittenango, New York. When Denslow was an infant, his family moved to Inwood-on-Hudson, on the northern part of Manhattan, where he drew his first pictures—sketches of flowers found by his father, a botanist. Apparently his untrained efforts revealed some talent and his parents enrolled him in the Cooper Institute and the National Academy of Design in New York. He was an impecunious art student, spending his small funds on clothes rather than food. Years later, he told an interviewer that for a time he lived only on corn meal. Once when a young woman dined with him, “he fed her on four courses of corn-meal. There was an overture of mush and milk . . . a fillet of fried mush, a ragout of mush and butter and sugar.” Before he had reached the age of twenty, his family’s meagre funds had been exhausted and he had to earn a living on his own. His career did not begin auspiciously; he wandered through Maine painting advertisements for Wing’s Pills on every available surface—not even cows were safe from Denslow’s brush.

After tiring of Wing’s Pills—or perhaps running out of places to paint the ads—Denslow became a roving illustrator of regional atlases and histories. He probably did considerable work at this time but only a few items are known, including two books: Historical Sketch of Franklin County, Pennsylvania (1878) and A New Invasion of the South (1881). Thorough search in large libraries specializing in genealogy and eastern local history would probably yield more titles. The ones that have been discovered are not particularly interesting; Denslow’s pictures are rather painful woodcuts with stiff figures in the foreground.

For Denslow this was a period of personal insecurity and little artistic achievement. Many years later, he recalled that “the atlas people were named Barabbas, and they were robbers.” Sometime, perhaps during these early years, Denslow married his first wife, of whom nothing is known. It may also have been during this era—the1870’s or early 1880’s—that he turned to drink; in 1893 he mentioned he had once taken a cure for alcoholism. At any rate, he drifted out of the county atlas and history field and by 1886 he was engaged in theatrical work, illustrating the New York magazine The Theatre and designing costumes for plays. His caricatures and cartoons for The Theatre, though in the manner of such popular artists as Thomas Nast and John Tenniel, reveal the beginnings of a personal style in his decorative use of large black areas and the elimination of much secondary line.

In the late 1880’s when, as he later admitted, he was merely “plodding along,” a representative of the Chicago Herald saw and liked his work and invited him to join the staff of the paper. About 1888, Denslow arrived in Chicago where he not only drew for the paper but also illustrated several books. The first two, Twenty Years of Hus’ling (1888) and The Crime of the Century (1889), demonstrate little ability. He was trying to draw realistic pictures but his linework was crude and his figures were at best wooden. Perhaps he realized his limitations for his work in P. T. Barnum’s Dollars and Sense (1890) returns to the comic, decorative style of The Theatre, a style he would refine and enliven in his illustrations for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the other books at the height of his career.

Denslow remained in Chicago only two or three years before succumbing to a desire to see the West. In Denver, he combined newspaper illustrating with range-riding as a cowboy. Denslow, a fine raconteur, enjoyed retelling his Colorado adventures. He was once chased by a wolf pack, he was in the middle of a shoot-out (hiding under a table), and he tried to tame a bronco: “the animal humped its back into the form of a rainbow and at the same instant leaped into the air as if shot from a mortar. It then seemed to me that I continued on and up for a delightfully indefinite period after the broncho [sic] had returned to earth. But at last I reached a turning point in my career and began to descend with equal velocity. My recollection is decidedly hazy as to the exact circumstances of my contact with the ground.”

Densllow apparently decided that he was not a frontiersman and by 1892 he had arrived in San Francisco where he worked for many of the local newspapers. His pictures during this period are most accessible in The Californian Illustrated Magazine. Some of his California drawings continue his unhappy attempt at realism, but others show his comic touch. Fortunately his diary survives for a portion of 1893 and for the first time we can say something about Denslow’s character. It is obvious from the number of his friends and his social life that he was a gregarious, popular man. His congenial relationships did not, however, mask a fundamental strain of cynicism. He was, we know from later evidence, always “grumbling about nothing, always carping, always censorious, and laughing uproariously when he had secured his effect.” In his diary for February 4, 1893, Denslow remarked bitterly, “I shall believe no one and pretend to trust all, and endeavor to carve out my own salvation.” At the end of the next month, he wrote that “the world is a great one and lately seems to be built upon the joke principle and as usual the joke is on me. It always has been and always will be even to my deathbed. In my last moments  I suspect someone will give it me in the neck and perhaps get ahead of me with St. Peter.”

In San Francisco, Denslow became acquainted with oriental art and began to build his fine collection. He had a great admiration for the people of Chinatown; he later told an interviewer for Carter’s  Monthly, “the Chinese, like the Japanese, are wonderfully artistic in a decorative sense, and the insight into this phase of their life . . . has been of permanent value to me.” The oriental influence is particularly striking in Denslow’s later pictures. His bold black line and large areas of colors were perhaps derived from the Japanese print, then an international fad. The shallow space and absence of modeling in the Japanese “floating world” print are evident in Denslow’s finest work in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and other books.

Except for Chinatown, Denslow did not like San Francisco. He was contemptuous of those he called the “addle-headed native sons of the Golden West,” and he was appalled by the great poverty of San Francisco which, he believed, was “rank and rotten to the core.” Not surprisingly he dreamed of going back to Chicago. He would, he wrote optimistically, “make Chicago hum.” By the middle of April 1893, he had returned and received $70 a week to illustrate the Chicago Herald, notably with scenes from the Columbian Exposition.

Denslow, however, was too cynical to praise the city unreservedly. “Chicago is one immense cash register” he wrote in his diary. But his return to the mid-west was the beginning of his greatest success. He joined the Chicago Press Club where he eventually met such writers and artists as Opie Read, John T. McCutcheon, the Leyendecker brothers, Frederick Richardson, and L. Frank Baum. Apparently through Opie Read, Denslow returned to book illustrating. He produced pictures for Read’s A Tennessee Judge (1893) and The Tear in the Cup (1894). He also illustrated magazines, producing covers and illustrations for Reed’s Carter’s Monthly and fine cover designs for the poster periodical The Echo in the style of Jules Cheret, the French poster artist. More important than these commissions was the fact that Denslow at last developed a personal style. This was the age of art nouveau, of sweeping lines, of drawings of impossibly beautiful women, of intricately designed posters and book illustrations. The leader of this artistic school in Chicago was Denslow’s friend Will Bradley whose beautiful cover designs were appearing on The Inland Printer which was also printing Denslow’s work. Under the influence of art nouveau, Denslow learned to control his pen for the best artistic effects. He did not, however, let himself be controlled by this style; he learned from it but did not whole-heartedly adopt it. The two-dimensionality of the style never overpowered his drawing. Perhaps he was too much a cynic to accept the impossible beauty so admired by his contemporaries. When Bradley designed a poster for the Chap Book of gorgeous ladies with the art nouveau pout of Aubrey Beardsley’s designs, Denslow drew a parody entitled the “Haughti Lady” as a Chicago Herald poster and later expanded the idea into a calendar. In 1895, the year the art nouveau style is first evident in his work, Denslow seems to have adopted the tiny seahorse, or hippocampus, as his trade mark.

As the quality of his work improved, his commissions increased and he lived in some elegance, having a studio in the Fine Arts Building in Chicago (which he shared for a time with Ike Morgan, a young St. Louis artist who was to illustrate two of Baum’s books), and a house on Lake Michigan in the Chicago suburb of Highwood. He named the house “Hippocampus” and filled it with the Chinese art he had purchased in San Francisco.

The following year, 1896, was one of the most important of Denslow’s life, both personally and professionally. He married Ann Waters Holden, the daughter of a Chicago newspaperwoman. Ann Waters seems to have stilled Denslow’s wanderlust and to have brightened his view of life, though publicly he remained something of a misanthrope. In the same year, he became an artist for Rand, McNally and Company. He illustrated two books for this firm, Read’s An Arkansas Planter (1896) and Charles Warren Stoddard’s A Cruise Under the Crescent (1898). If the drawings for these volumes are not memorable, at least they are skilled and no longer wooden. In addition, he designed more than one hundred book covers for Rand, McNally, receiving $10 or $15 apiece. During the 1890’s a new trend in book design began, with the drab covers of the mid-century giving way to brightly colored, stamped designs. Denslow’s cover designs are generally in the graceful art nouveau style; but several have arrangements of figures seen frequently in his later books: a frieze of similar people or animals, each differing from its neighbor in slight details. Most of the covers are strikingly attractive.

Also in 1896, Denslow became acquainted with Elbert Hubbard of East Aurora, New York. Hubbard  was attempting to emulate William Morris’s “Arts and Crafts Movement” in various manufactures. Denslow spent a portion of almost every year in East Aurora, illustrating books, designing covers and posters, and illustrating The Ancient Mariner (1899) and The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam (1906). The Anicent Mariner is his fines accomplishment in the art nouveau style, and Denslow’s work for Hubbard earned the admiration of the French artist Alphonse Mucha. Hubbard’s group, the Roycrofters, was engaged in fashionable cynicism, and this mood was perfect for Denslow, whose mocking cartoons appeared in Hubbard’s two magazines, The Philistine and The Fra. Perhaps his best cartoon shows a preacher on his back juggling with his feet a barrel labeled “Truth.” Denslow also drew two prints which were distributed throughout the Roycrofters: a grinning skull with a laurel wreath and labeled “What’s the Use?” and, even more effective, a skull wearing a Roman helmet and labeled “Victory.” In his Highwood home, Denslow had a real skull with “What’s the Use?” carved beneath it.

Denslow continued his development as a comic artist in many of his illustrations for Hubbard. This ability to put humor into hisdrawings was to be important in his work with L. Frank Baum whom he also met in 1896. Baum was already planning to write children’s books (his first, Mother Goose in Prose, appeared the next year), and it was natural that he would seek out a successful artist like Denslow. Although Baum objected to Denslow’s jaundiced view of life—he called “What’s the Use?” a “misanthrope’s contention”—the two men became close friends. Denslow contributed two pictures to Baum’s privately printed By the Candelabra’s Glare (1898), and they planned together to print Father Goose: His Book (1899) with Denslow’s drawings and Baum’s verses. One of Baum’s rhymes, incidentally, is about “Little Annie Waters.” Although Denslow had made pictures for a projected (but never issued) edition of Alice in Wonderland, Father Goose was his first published children’s book. He did a masterful job. In Father Goose, many of Denslow’s early developments reach fruition. The work is of a sure hand, the humor is broad, the designs are carefully conceived and executed. He effectively uses friezes of characters marching across the page. Although the colors seem subdued to the modern eye—yellow, orange, black, and gray—it is almost ablaze with color when compared to the usual children’s book of the day. Denslow could now draw graceful pictures, but he purposely returned to his early woodenness for decorative and humorous effect. Baum realized that his verses in Father Goose were not particularly good and Denslow surely deserves much of the credit for the book’s outstanding success.

The 1900 Baum-Denslow book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was an even greater triumph for both men. Baum’s story is excellent, but Denslow’s work was also instrumental in the initial reception. The book is riotous in color with the pictures cutting into and sometimes literally obscuring the text. The color plates are decorative and perfectly complement the text.

Baum and Denslow collaborated on only one other book, Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901). Baum claims in his preface that this book contains Denslow’s finest work, but I believe that it is something of a falling off for Denslow. He excelled in the use of color but Dot and Tot has no color plates. In addition, his illustrations are too decorative; nothing seems to happen in the drawings. Denslow was not entirely at fault for little occurs in Baum’s story either.

Denslow’s Mother Goose, which appeared the same year, more than makes up for the disappointment of Dot and Tot of Merryland, for it is Denslow’s finest illustrated book. Like his work in Father Goose and the Wonderful Wizard his pictures are funny and carefully executed. Mother Goose has daring use of color. Denslow ignores borders, allowing his colors to bleed to the edge of the pages. Denslow’s edition of Mother Goose is one of the most attractive ever published.

Why Baum and Denslow separated is not definitely known. There seems to have been some friction over the musical extravaganza version of The Wizard of Oz in 1902. Denslow shared the copyright of the book and therefore was associated with the production of the play. Baum wrote the typescript for the musical and Denslow designed the costumes. Apparently, differences arose over which man was primarily responsible for the success of the book and perhaps of the play as well. Moreover, Baum probably objected to Denslow’s claiming credit for their books. Particularly annoying to Baum must have been the fact that Denslow illustrated independently two Father Goose comic pages, one of which does not even mention Baum. On the earlier page Denslow claimed to be the “creator” of Father Goose. Baum responded by claiming to be “the original Father Goose” in the newspaper syndication of his American Fairy Tales (1901). When Denslow decided to move to New York about 1902, he and Baum ended their cooperation. But Denslow still had copyrights of the Baum-Denslow books and, around 1903, George W. Ogilvie and Company published a rare pamphlet entitled Pictures from the Wonderful Wizard of Oz “by W. W. Denslow,” with no ention of Baum; in 1902, Dillingham published Denslow’ s pamphlet Scarecrow and the Tin-Man (the text is reprinted in the Autumn 1963 Baum Bugle); and about the same time Denslow wrote and illustrated a series of newspaper stories about the two characters. Denslow went so far as to claim in his list of accomplishments sent to the editors of The Artist’s Year Book (1905) that he “originated the characters of Scarecrow and Tin Woodman” in the Wizard play.

Baum was well aware of Denslow’s claims. On August 10, 1915, he wrote to Frank K. Reilly of Reilly & Britton, “Denslow was allowed to copyright his pictures conjointly with my claim to authorship . . . and, having learned my lesson from my unfortunate experiences with Denslow,” he would never allow another artist to share his copyright. But, despite these strong feelings, Baum noted in another letter to Reilly (September 11, 1915) that “I used to receive many compliments on Denslow’s pictures when he was illustrating my books, from children and others.”

As a successful artist, Denslow was able to indulge his whims and he bought an island off Bermuda which he named Denslow Island, granting himself the title “King Denslow I.” He spent a portion of each year there, doing some of his finest work. He began a collection of books about piracy and he drew pictures of the underwater world. According to a contemporary account, “in order to get the proper coloring he painted while swaying in a small boat, his helpers holding water glasses over the surface to prevent ripples.” By this time, Denslow had separated from Ann Waters and, at the end of 1904, married Mrs. Frances Doolittle.

In 1902, 1903, and 1904, Denslow continued the high standard which he had set in his Baum titles and Mother Goose. His beautiful edition of Clement Clarke Moore’s Night Before Christmas appeared in 1902. The following year, Dillingham published the first twelve titles of Denslow’s Picture Books, a series written and illustrated by Denslow. In 1904, the series was expanded to eighteen pamphlets (one of which was his “Oz” tale, Denslow’s Scarecrow and the Tin-Man).  Particularly interesting are his illustrations for Tom Thumb which combine graceful art nouveau line work and his typical stiff figures. Although he was not an accomplished author, his versions of old stories for these picture books are generally good. He had learned from Baum’s belief that children’s stories should not be terrifying. Denslow hoped “to make books for children that are replete with good clean wholesome fun and from which the coarseness and vulgarity are excluded.”

After Baum and Denslow had ended their association, Baum was fortunate in finding talented artists like Fanny Y. Cory, John R. Neill, and Frederick Richardson, but Denslow was never again associated with an author of Baum’s calibre. Denslow worked with Paul West, Dudley Bragdon, Richard Webb, and Isabel Johnston—certainly not names to conjure with. In addition, Denslow fancied himself a writer and, as co-author of two books that he illustrated, The Pearl and the Pumpkin (1904) and Billy Bounce (1906), must be partly responsible for the mediocre stories. The text of Isabel Johnston’s The Jeweled Toad (1907), which one reviewer wrongly called “an Oz-like tale,” is only slightly better. Except for his unmemorable work for Webb’s Me and Lawson (1905), Denslow’s illustrations remained excellent but all these books have long been forgotten; the stories are simply too uninspired.

How financially successful these books were we do not know, but Denslow’s commissions began to fall off. He could still draw well although his last book, When I Grow Up (1909), does not show off his talents. The pictures do not have the bright, flat colors that are characteristic of Denslow’s best work and his line work lacks its sureness. Nevertheless, the many advertising pamphlets he produced at this time demonstrate that he had not lost any of his ability. With less major work, his financial situation deteriorated and he drank heavily. After 1911, he was not even illustrating advertising booklets and he was eventually reduced to earning about $25 a week at a New York agency, the Rosenbaum Studios. Maurice Kursh, who worked with Denslow at the time, has written some of his recollections to David L. Greene. “The staff consisted of about five youngsters like myself, one older man, and Mr. Denslow . . . He never bothered much with us youngsters, though he did exchange friendly confidences with the older man and used to tell him of his earlier experiences and successes. And on one occasion, when he told him of his former wealth, the large yacht and plantation he once had owned on the Isle of Pines in the Caribbean, it seemed too much for this man to believe. And when he indicated his skepticism with a touch of scorn, Mr. Denslow retired to himself and never spoke again to anyone there.”

Denslow’s final years were sad, but in 1914  or 1915 he began again to get commissions. He sold material to the children’s magazine John Martin’s Book and, for the great comic weekly, Life, he designed a cover which ranks with the best of his work. Mr. Kursh remembers that Denslow was paid $250 for the cover. “He was so elated that he decided to celebrate with a drunk that lasted two days, and caught pneumonia and died [on March 27, 1915]. He had at the studio a large package containing his personal papers. . . . In it were many newspaper clippings etc. and photos of the yacht and plantation which fully corroborated all that he had told of himself. From what I can remember of him, he seemed to me a man one could like, quiet, friendly, intelligent. I would have liked to have known him better. . . .”

Since Denslow’s death, his work has fallen into obscurity. Perhaps Denslow was right that for him the world was “built upon the joke principle.” But as more is known about his art, it becomes apparent that Denslow did not deserve his fate and that he belongs in the ranks of America’s greatest illustrators of children’s books.

[Most of those who have assisted me in preparing this article are acknowledged at the end of the Denslow checklist on page 23, but I should like to express my gratitude to Mr. Maurice Kursh for recording his recollections of Denslow and to Professor C. Warren Hollister for allowing me to quote from Denslow’s diary.]

Authors of articles from The Baum Bugle that are reprinted on the Oz Club’s website retain all rights. All other website contents Copyright © 2024 The International Wizard of Oz Club, Inc. All Rights Reserved.