Several years ago, I bought a small collection of postcards illustrating what I gathered from the captions were fables. I’ve always loved them and never thought to find out the identity of the original artist until recently, when I came across the work of Charles Livingston Bull, whose style is quite similar. Like Bull, Bransom was born in the late 1800s and called Washington, DC, home for a time in his life. Bransom got his start as an artist there, sketching animals he saw at the National Zoo. According to Wikipedia, Bransom “began his career as a technical draftsman for the U.S. Patent Office when he was 13 years old. In 1903 he moved to New York City where he worked for the New York Evening Journal as a comic strip artist… His earliest commissions were covers for the Saturday Evening Post and illustrations for editions of Kipling’s Just So Stories and Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.” The postcards I admire are illustrations from An Argosy of Fables, published in 1921. Thanks to Internet Archive, I was able to see many more of Bransom’s beautiful and classic illustrations in Neighbours Unknown, Hoof and Claw, and The Feet of the Furtive (stories I’ve definitely added to my “to read” list).
From “An Argosy of Fables,” 1921
From “Neighbours Unknown,” 1910
From “Hoof and Claw,” 1921
From “The Feet of the Furtive,” 1921
Source: Internet Archive
Posted December 23rd, 2015
