Sarah Stilwell cover illustration for "Collier's Weekly" (1907): rare, beautifully framed antique

$290.00

IMAGE TITLE: Little Red Riding Hood
    By Sara Stilwell 
    Collier's - The National Weekly
    June 15, 1907 Issue
    Vol XXXIX No 12


IMAGE INFORMATION
    Image Size: H 15.00” x W 11.00”
    Matted & Framed:  H 22.00” x W 18.00”
    Framed Price: $290.00  
    Packaging and shipping approximately $25.00
   

In 1902, SS received a commission from Century Magazine to illustrate Josephine Daskin's poem, "Christmas Hymn of Children." The request was for an image conveying the mood of the poem and a graphic to embellish the text. Readers of Collier’s December issue did not know they were viewing an artistic transformation. In the halftone B&W lithograph that appears in this magazine, the artist has dropped the wooden form that defined her work in 1898. In its place, she is exploring the inner life of her subjects. This was, of course, what Pyle had encouraged her to do.

The following year she proved she had completed the transformation of her art and mastered Pyle’s approach. She did this in a pictorial essay which appeared in St. Nicholas's December 1903 issue. The magazine’s pace-setting editor, Mary Mapes Dodge, published half a dozen of SS’s drawings in a piece called “Happy Days.” In these pictures, SS softened her compositions and highlighted her characters.

1904 was, as we now say, a breakout year for Sarah Stilwell. Her connection with Mary Mapes Dodge strengthened during a second commission, this one to illustrate a new issue in Dodge’s Rhymes and Jingle series. SS's 1907 cover illustration can be seen as a step in a transition that carried from the representationalism she learned under Howard Pyle, through the colorful world of children she encountered in the Plastic Club of Philadelphia, into her own mature artistic style, which focused on the innocence of children and happiness.

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