Peter Newell

Peter Sheaf Hersey Newell, an acclaimed American illustrator, cartoonist, and author, was born during the Civil War near Rice’s Corners in McDonough County, Illinois, on March 5th, 1862. Throughout his lifetime, Newell worked as a freelance artist and produced countless distinguished art works. He not only built a reputation with his humor and whimsical illustrations in the 1880s and 1890s, got his work featured in acclaimed publications such as Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, Scribner’s Magazine, New York Graphic, the Saturday Evening Post, Judge, etc., but also illustrated books for eminent authors such as Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll. He specializes in drawing little kids and animals, and was known for the soft yet rich continuous flat tones he uses in his cartoons.

Newell lived in Bushnell up until his graduation from the local high school in 1880, and thereafter he moved to Jacksonville, where he took his first steps into his art career, copying and enhancing photographs as a crayon portraitist at Clendenon & Nichols photography studio. Later in 1883, he moved to New York, where he attended the Art Student’s League and got his illustrations published in the Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Graphic. In 1884, he returned to Illinois and opened his own studio, but came back to Jacksonville again just the following year and married Leona Dow Ashcraft. As a result, he ended up going back and forth between Illinois and New York for the next several years. Newell would spend his winters in New York to continue to enroll in the Art Students League and summers in Illinois. Thereafter, his family grew and traveled a lot. In 1887, their first daughter, Helen Louise, was born when the couple went to Nebraska to visit Newell’s sister. In another two years, their second daughter, Josephine, was born in Chicago, then their third child, the last child, a son, Clendenon Sheaf Newell, was born in 1892, when the family moved back to New York.

Not long after