Peter Newell's A Shadow Show

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Peter Newell (1862-1924) was born in McDonough County, Illinois, the son of Fred Newell, a wagon maker. As a youngster, he attended schools in Bushnell, Illinois. He was born as Peter Sheaf Hersey Newell in McDonough County, Illinois, near the small town of Bushnell, the son of George Frederick Newell, a wagon maker, and Louisa Dodge. Named for his father's business partner and relative Peter Sheaf Hersey, Newell showed an early taste for drawing and was encouraged in it by his family. While in high school, he did a large oil painting, The Good Samaritan, which his father proudly framed and submitted to the annual Bushnell County Fair and which won a blue ribbon. Newell caricatured his classmates and teachers throughout…show more content…
A second volume of Topsys and Turvys appeared the next year. In 1896 Newell published A Shadow Show, containing seventy-two droll silhouettes. In 1899 a collection of Newell's work,Pictures and Rhymes, appeared, with the still-popular "Wild Flowers" as its frontispiece, followed in 1909 by Jungle Jangle, a collection of illustrated nonsense verse about animals. A particularly ingenious novelty volume by Newell was The Hole Book (1908), produced with an actual hole through the center of the pages and illustrating the path of a bullet shot off by a naughty boy. In 1912 Newell repeated the device with The Rocket Book, detailing the career of a rocket set off in the basement of an apartment house as it passed through each of the floors. Even more innovative was his 1910 volume The Slant Book, bound in a rhomboid shape and recounting the hilarious effects of a baby carriage rolling down a hill. Harper's Weekly sent Newell to cover the Paris Exposition in 1900 and both the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions in 1912. He continued…show more content…
Criticized for presuming to compete with the original engravings by Sir John Tenniel, Newell published a spirited defense of his own pictorial interpretations in Harper's ("Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from an Artist's Standpoint," Oct. 1901, pp. 713- 17). Newell's gentle humor, which Albert Lee called "as demure as a Quaker's smile and as guileless" (p. 335), won him the respect and affection of a wide public. In 1893 the Newells moved to Leonia, New Jersey, where the genial artist was an exceptionally popular citizen, participating widely in civic affairs and singing in his local church choir. In his later years he devoted himself to "serious" painting, on which he worked conscientiously until his death in Little Neck, Long Island. His conventional art work was exhibited at the New York Academy of Design and the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, but it is for the whimsical charm of his distinctive humorous drawings that he is likely to be remembered. Figure 5: Newell, Peter. The Rocket Book, 1912. Sources: "Book Illustrators, XXII:

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