Grace Drayton (1878-1936)* was a well-known illustrator and cartoonist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Drayton grew up in Philadelphia’s art world. Her father was a lithographer by training and a well respected publisher of fine arts books and reproductions.**  She was one of seven siblings, most of whom had careers in the arts. She studied at Drexel Institute and the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.*** While at the Philadelphia School, she studied with artist Robert Henri, who actively promoted women to take up artistic careers.****

Beginning in 1895, Drayton worked as a freelance artist for a variety of publications. Although she first made her living drawing fashionable young women as illustrations for magazine stories and fashion pages, she was best known for what she called her “funny babies”— chubby children with big eyes, pug noses and rosy cheeks that she claimed were modeled after herself. (Personally, I don’t see the resemblance.) Characters in this style included the highly popular (and now very collectible) Dolly Dingle paper dolls which appeared in the women’s magazine Pictorial Review and syndicated comic strips for the Hearst syndicate recounting the mischievous adventures of characters such as Naughty Toodles, Dolly Dimples, and the Pussycat Princess.  Some comics historians speculate that she influenced early Japanese manga in the 1930s.

Her most famous characters were the Campbell Soup kids, who cavorted through soup advertisements beginning in 1904 and continuing long after Drayton’s death, well into the 1990s in fact. They appeared not only in ads, but in merchandise. They were seen as healthy and wholesome—exactly the image Campbell wanted to project about its canned soups. They were also modern, changing to fit each decade. In the 1920s they talked on the telephone, danced the Charleston, flew airplanes, and visited Egypt after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. In the Depression years of the 1930s, they went to work as policemen, utility workers, and circus performers. During World War II, they sold war bonds and acted as air raid wardens.

 

Andy Warhol, move over.

*Born Grace Gebbie and briefly Grace Wiederseim. Because women’s names change. (Pro tip: If you want to make things easier on your biographer, don’t change your name when you marry.)

**We’ve seen this before. Women artists from the earliest days were often the daughters of father with careers in or adjacent to the visual arts. (In fact, the role of artist fathers is a recurring theme in Bridget Quinn’s book about women artists, Broad Strokes.)

***I have been fascinated for some time by these design schools for women, which sprang up in the mid-nineteenth century in industrial cities in the American north east. So far I have resisted the temptation for a deep dive. Now might be the time since I’m between projects. What do you think?

****Henri is best known as the driving force behind the Ashcan School of American art—a story for another time. (It’s a rabbit hole and parenthetical statement kind of day.)