Charles Nicholas Sarka 

Charles Nicholas Sarka,	Born Chicago, IL 1879,  Died New York City (?), NY 1960

Sarka's travels as a young man produced a rich body of work. He camped along the Indian River in turn-of-the-century Florida and roamed Southern California on horseback. He journeyed to the South Seas, Hawaii, Egypt, Morocco, the Caribbean, and Europe. With a delicate touch and an unselfconscious eye, he painted a record of the natural beauty he encountered and of the people he came to know. It is through his work, from the first peripatetic years of his career, that Sarka has been best known.

Yet, for all his youthful wonderlust, Sarka spent most of his life rooted. He lived 60 years in New York City and for 50 years kept a summer camp on Canada Lake in the Adirondacks, among a small colony of artist friends. He made his living as an illustrator and muralist, but Sarka's passion was the uncommissioned paintings and drawings that he did every day, works that shimmer with vitality and sheer creative joy. In New York, he often focused on the quotidian - a neighborhood streetscape or the view from his apartment window of rooftop chimney pots. At Canada Lake, too, where nature was his focus, he was less interested in the grand majesty than in minor miracles: a patch of sunlit asters, or a rock outcropping in an autumnal wood. Over the long haul, some of Sarka's most successful works were small-scale sketches and paintings, uncluttered and intitmate.

Born in Chicago, Sarka apprenticed at age 11 in an engraving plant, sketching figures on blocks for engravers. By age 16 he was a staff artist on the Chicago Record. Sarka excelled as an artist reporter and was soon hired away by the New York Herald. In New York he met artist George "Pop" Hart, who was to be his traveling companion to Florida, Egypt and the South Seas. Between trips Sarka built his name as an illustrator for Collier's, Cosmpolitian, Harper's and other popular magazines. Sarka wed Grace Jones, sister of Haydon Jones, a well known artist reporter. They were married nearly 50 years, until his death in 1960.

Works by Sarka are in the collections of the Metropolitian Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Portrait Gallery and other public and private collections.

The Hula-hula under the Bread Tree

Spearing Fish on the Reef of Tahiti

 Golden Days (Watercolor)

Incense (Watercolor)

Hawaiian Fisherman 1904

Inspiration

The Life of the Railroad Man illustrated by William Dodge Stevens

William Dodge Stevens was born September 13, 1870 in Tidioute, Pennsylvania. His father, Captain William Stone Stevens, was born in 1839 in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 1889, at the age of nineteen, William Dodge Stevens moved to Chicago to attend the Chicago Art Institute of Chicago. His two most influential art teachers were J. H. Vanderpoel and O. D. Grover. The young artist lived at the Colonial Hotel. In 1892 He completed his art studies and began to work as a staff artist in busy advertising industry of Chicago.

William Dodge Stevens illustrated Cosmopolitan, Ladies' World, McClure's Magazine, Woman's Home Companion, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper's Bazaar and Harper's Monthly.

1908

 "Hey! Hey! You there,  Dominie, Parson! ...What kind of signal is that ye're givin'me?"
                   

 "I delighted in catching and riding in the most swiftly flying cars."

 "...Became an expert at making quick couplings and flying switches."

 "I felt a life-giving relief as I fell fainting, but thankful, into the arms of the boys."

 "I watch that grimy left hand on thr throttle, for the preliminary swelling of the muscles."

 "Her engineer shouted something that we couldn't catch...Tom replied: '^Go ahead, Sonny; you're alright.'"

 "Thr lokomotives reared up like horses, the cars shoved their tenders under them in  such a way as to ...raise the bridge off its abutements; ...and then...a belated gravel train came...and plumped in on top of us."

"It wasn't  long before I had crawled under the truck,...and was making fairly good progress...in the direction of the ray of light..."

John Gilpin illustrated by C.E. Brock

John Gilpin (18th century) was featured as the subject in a well-known comic ballad of 1782 by William Cowper, entitled The Diverting History of John Gilpin. Cowper had heard the story from his friend Lady Austen.
Gilpin was said to be a wealthy draper from Cheapside in London, who owned land at Olney, Buckinghamshire, near where Cowper lived. It is likely that he was a Mr Beyer, a linen draper of the Cheapside corner of Paternoster Row. The poem tells how Gilpin and his wife and children became separated during a journey to the Bell Inn, Edmonton, after Gilpin loses control of his horse, and is carried ten miles farther to the town of Ware.(Wikipedia)
Charles Edmund Brock (5 February 1870 – 28 February 1938) was a widely published English painter, line artist and book illustrator, who signed most of his work C. E. Brock.

 Frontispiece

 "To-morrow is our wedding day"

 "Where they did all 'get' in"

 "T'was long before the customers were suited to their mind"

  "Equipped from top to toe"

"The snorting beast began to trot"

 "At last it flew away"

"The bottles twain behind his back were shattered at a blow"

 "What news? what news? your tidings tell"

"A braying ass did sing most loud and clear"

 "Stop thief! stop thief! a highwayman!"

 "For he got first to town"