illustrator nell brinkley

      Nell Brinkley (September 5, 1886 – October 21, 1944) was an American illustrator and comic artist who was sometimes referred to as the “Queen of Comics” during her nearly four-decade career working with New York newspapers and magazines. She was the creator of the iconic Brinkley Girl, a stylish character who appeared in her comics and became a popular symbol in songs, films and theater.

      Nell Brinkley was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1886 (some sources say 1888), but her family soon moved to the small town of Edgewater on Denver’s western border, facing Sloan’s Lake at Manhattan Beach. She was not formally trained in the arts, and dropped out of high school to follow her natural talent with pen and ink. As a tot, she drew place-setting illustrations of knobby-kneed kiddies for Mary Elitch’s garden parties at Elitch Gardens. At the age of 16, she was already accomplished at illustration. She illustrated the book cover and 25 illustrations for a 1906 children’s book, Wally Wish and Maggie Magpie by A.U. Mayfield. She was hired to do pen-and-ink drawings for The Denver Post and later the Rocky Mountain News.

      Her skills were noticed in 1907 by media mogul William Randolph Hearst and his editor Arthur Brisbane. Though still a teenager, she was convinced to move from Denver to Brooklyn, New York, with her mother. She began working in downtown Manhattan with the Journal, where she produced large detailed illustrations with commentary almost daily. The newspaper’s circulation boomed; her artwork was featured in the magazine section.

      Within a year of her arrival in New York, she became well known for her breezy and entertaining creations. The curly-haired everyday working-girl drawings were known as the Brinkley Girl, who soon upstaged Charles Dana Gibson’s Gibson Girl. The Ziegfeld Follies (1908) used the Brinkley Girl as a theme, and three popular songs were written about her. Bloomingdale’s department store featured a Nell Brinkley Day with advertisements using many of her drawings. Women emulated the hairstyles in the cartoons and purchased Nell Brinkley Hair Curlers for ten cents a card. Young girls saved her drawings, colored them and pasted them in scrapbooks. The Denver Press Club greeted her when she vacationed in Colorado in the summer of 1908. Nell was most famous for her representing “relationships between boy and girl—man and woman—Bettys and Billies.” Her illustrations used the drawing of “Dan Cupid” to represent the presence of that something most people call “love”.

Brinkley’s reputation was also established by an early assignment to cover the sensational murder trial of Harry K. Thaw. She was assigned many interviews with the actress-wife, Evelyn Nesbit. In later years, she covered other infamous murder trials. She produced numerous courtroom illustrations printed in the Evening Journal and other Hearst newspapers.

      Nell flew with Glen Martin in his new biplane and reported the daring swoopings and the landing for her readers. Nell helped with War Bond drives, and she entertained and consoled those at home and the American youth abroad, during and just after World War I. She traveled to Washington, D.C. where she interviewed many young ladies who had left their homes to become defense workers.

      Nell also became known for the charming text that accompanied her stories and reporting while she worked at the Evening Journal and other publications that included Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Magazine. She produced many illustrated theatre reviews and profiles of mothers and young women in society, including later, in the 1930s First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Much of her writing promoted the working women of the time, and encouraged the expansion of women’s rights.

      Her work was distributed to newspapers internationally by King Features Syndicate. By 1935, however, photography began to replace illustrations in newspapers. She had become the most prolific and famous romantic writer-illustrator. Later, she illustrated books and produced topical multi-panel art pages of art. One was collected in a 1943 anthology of comics.

      In 1944, when large headlines were about the battles of World War II, Nell Brinkley quietly died after over 30 years of entertaining fans from the “most read newspapers,” the major media of her time—she was soon to be forgotten. Her mother and father and Nell are buried in a New Rochelle, New York cemetery.

More Links to Nell Brinkley:

• Nell Brinkley: Forgotten Heroes
• Find Brinkley cartoons at the Ohio State University
• Nell Brinkley on tumblr
• “The Last of Summer” by Nell Brinkley
• A category dedicated to Nell Brinkley now open at http://eastereggcrafts.blogspot.com
• The Butterfly and Bee

Portraits of Ladies by Nell Brinkley: