Thomas Nast

(b Landau, Bavaria, 27 Sept 1840; d Guayaquil, Ecuador, 7 Dec 1902).

American illustrator of German birth. His family emigrated to the USA and settled in New York when he was six. Precocious at drawing, Nast was taught by the German-born history painter Theodore Kaufmann (b 1814) and later studied briefly at the National Academy of Design. In 1855, aged 15, he began to work for Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Magazine, which continued to publish his political cartoons until 1858.

In 1860 Nast reported the Heenan-Sayers prize-fight in England for the New York Illustrated News and spent four months covering Garibaldi's campaign in Sicily and southern Italy for the News and the Illustrated London News. In 1862 Nast joined the staff of Harper's Weekly, where he worked until 1886. During that time he established the power of the American political cartoon. His Civil War drawings for Harper's were primarily trenchant propaganda against the South. Abraham Lincoln called Nast 'the Union's best recruiting sergeant'. His drawings mixed patriotism and sentiment, although a few achieved a broader humanistic statement about war.

Nast's style was fully developed by 1870. His drawings concentrated on a single strong image, in contrast to his earlier work, which attempted to combine several incidents. The directness of his mature style may be due to his increased interest in painting and book illustration. Incisive lines reinforced the pointed wit of his subject-matter, and bold images translated more effectively into wood-engraving. After 1865 he based his portrait caricatures on photographs, as other British and American cartoonists had done. Nast subtly insinuated character traits and personal weaknesses into the expressions of the well-known public figures that were his subject-matter. This combination of truth and exaggeration made provocative concrete imagery out of abstract ideas. The point was reinforced by short satirical captions. The enormous public response to his work gave Nast greater influence than any other cartoonist.

Beginning with Lincoln in 1861, each of the six presidential candidates backed by Nast and Harper's was elected, earning Nast the name of 'president maker'. He also originated the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant as party symbols and helped to shape popular American images of Santa Claus, Uncle Sam and Columbia. While Nast's political cartoons relate to earlier American ephemera, his more direct stylistic influence was the British illustrated press. The caricatures in Punch and the line drawings of John Tenniel were of particular importance to his mature style.

Nast is most famous for his relentless battle from 1869 to 1871 against the 'Tweed Ring', a gang of corrupt politicians who controlled the government of New York. Headed by 'Boss' William Marcy Tweed, the Ring defrauded the city of some $200 million. It was broken as the result of the overwhelming public campaign aroused by Nast's devastating cartoons. 'Boss' Tweed was sentenced to prison but escaped to Spain, where, ironically, he was arrested after being identified from one of Nast's cartoons.

By the mid-1880s interest in Nast's style had declined as popular attention was drawn to the cartoons in Joseph Keppler's Puck, a comic weekly illustrated with colour lithographs. In 1886 Nast left Harper's; resuming his interest in illustration and painting, he published a book, Thomas Nast's Christmas Drawings for the Human Race (New York, 1890, rev. 1978). In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt, an admirer, appointed Nast American Consul to Guayaquil, Ecuador, where six months later he died of yellow fever. (Source: EDWARD BRYANT, "Thomas Nast," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, (Oxford University Press, Accessed August 21, 2004), )