Jessie Wilcox Smith and Her Child Models

The American illustrator Jessie Wilcox Smith produced over 200 covers for Good Housekeeping Magazine, most of them featuring children. 

Editors of that magazine said that her artwork represented "the highest ideals of the American home, the home with that sweet wholesomeness one associates with a sunny living-room—and children."

She never married and didn't have her own children. So where did she get her child models? She tried using professional models, but they didn't work out for her. She said, 

"Such a thing as a paid and trained child model is an abomination and a travesty on childhood—a poor little crushed and scared, unnatural atom, automatically taking the pose and keeping it in a spiritless lifeless manner. The professional child model is usually a horribly self-conscious overdressed child whose fond parents proudly insist that he or she is just what you want and give a list of the people for whom he or she has posed."

Instead she asked her friends with kids to come by and let their children play in her home and studio, where she could observe and sketch them in natural moments of interaction, driven by their own curiosity and childlike instincts.

She recalled: 

"While they were playing and having a perfect time, I would watch and study them, and try to get them to take unconsciously the positions that I happened to be wanting for a picture. 

"Once during the war, when I was painting children's portraits while doing my bit for one of the Liberty Loan drives... I painted the portrait of three little brothers. They were just steps apart, little yellow-headed fellows, all dressed in canary-colored suits and as much alike as the proverbial peas. Their greatest distinction lay in the toys they carried. One had an elephant, one a camel, and the smallest a kiddie car... He disported himself by riding it round and round my easel while I worked, and I could catch a glimpse of his face only as he looked this way  for a second while turning a corner."

The new issue of Illustration Magazine includes a cover feature on the American illustrator Jessie Wilcox Smith written by Dan Zimmer. It also features illustrator John Schoenherr, famous for his Dune covers.

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You can order Illustration #75 at the Illustration Magazine website.

Book: Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love by Alice Carter features JWS, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Violet Oakley. 

The Subject Was Children: The Art of Jessie Willcox Smith