Album: A.B. Frost

Arthur Burdett Frost (1851-1928) American illustrator, graphic artist, and comics writer. A. B. Frost was born in Philadelphia in 1851 and spent most of his prolific years in New Jersey. Though color blind, he illustrated more than ninety books and produced thousands of images for Harper's Weekly, Century, Scribner's, and Life magazines. Frost was also an ardent sportsman who spent his summers fishing, rowing, and hunting ducks and snipe. He completed hundreds of watercolors and oils and is probably best known for his hunting and shooting prints that capture the drama of sport in realistically detailed settings. Frost and R. Swain Gifford illustrated Theodore Roosevelt's 'Hunting Trips of a Ranchman.'

From 'Dictionary of Literary Biography' http://www.bookrags.com/biography/arthur-burdett-frost-dlb/ - Called the dean of American illustrators by critics and contemporaries, A. B. Frost has been described as the most American of the American illustrators of the turn of the century. Throughout his fifty-year career as an illustrator he displayed an unparalleled ability to capture the essence of the rural America of his time. His skill in portraying humorous situations set the standard for comedic art, and his characterizations of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit have become inseparable from those stories. Frost was hired by Harper and Brothers in 1876, joining an impressive rosters of illustrators including Howard Pyle, E. W. Kemble, Charles S. Reinhardt, Frederic Remington, and Edwin Austin Abbey. Within seven years he was one of the most popular artists at Harper, producing many illustrations and cartoons and earning over a hundred dollars a week, which, as Frost excitedly wrote in an 11 July 1883 letter to his fiancée, was a "mighty good price." The Frosts were married on 19 October 1883 and had two children, Arthur Jr. (born in 1887) and John (born in 1890). Augustus S. Daggy remembered Frost: "I never saw a man study so hard. Anatomy, photographs, everything he could get that would satisfy his consuming passion to know it all. He took such pains I really felt he would kill himself with overwork." Frost was an extremely self-critical artist and would often destroy dozens of drawings, convinced that he would never get it right. Despite his quick temper and self-doubts, his intimate friends knew him as warmhearted, generous, and entertaining. Full of nervous energy, he felt the need to be constantly active. One of the most interesting aspects of Frost's career is the fact that he was color-blind. While this did not affect his line drawings and pen-and-ink gouaches, it served to subdue his color work. Frost was obliged to have either his wife or one of his sons label his palette for him. To compensate for this deficiency he developed an acute eye for distinguishing color values rather than hues, and his resulting paintings are amazingly accurate. Overall, however, his color work has a soft and timid feel to it, and only his natural ability to distinguish his work with shadow and shading saves it from obscurity. By 1896 the distinctive signature of "A. B. Frost" could be found in all the major magazines-- Harper's Weekly, Scribner's Magazine, Century, and Collier's. Wanting to do more than just the cartoon-style illustrations for which he was known, he began producing paintings of outdoor sporting scenes. His love for the sport and for nature in general is revealed in the hunting scenes he did for Scribner's and in the portfolio of twelve lithographs and forty line drawings he did for Sporting Pictures, published in 1895-1896. The prints were extremely popular and became prized collectibles, decorating salons and men's clubs alike. These carefully composed illustrations are notable for their tranquility and attention to detail. After years of study with Eakins and Chase, Frost's easy handling of the anatomy of the animals and the posture of the hunters was now second nature. The action in the paintings is simply stated but powerful. In 1920 the renowned "American Beauty" illustrator Charles Dana Gibson approached Frost to contribute to Life magazine, which Gibson had recently purchased. Frost's first illustrations for the periodical were happily received by Gibson, and the two men would collaborate for the next six years. In addition to his magazine work, Frost resumed producing book illustrations. His illustrations were still highly sought after by other editors who realized that illustrations by an artist of Frost's stature could enormously increase the sales of a book. Frost was thus able to command top wages. In 1920 he was paid $200 for four illustrations he had done for "The Trials of Jonathon Goode," which appeared in the December 1920 issue of Scribner's Magazine. Frost continued to contribute comic vignettes and sporting scenes to Life and Scribner's Magazine until his death after a short illness on 22 June 1928.