Background
Franklin Booth was born July 8, 1874, in Indiana, United States. He was the son of John and Susan Emily (Wright) Booth. He was one of eight children in his family.
111 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603, USA
In 1901, Booth attended the Chicago Art Institute.
215 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019, USA
Booth attended the Art Students League in 1902.
Franklin Booth was born July 8, 1874, in Indiana, United States. He was the son of John and Susan Emily (Wright) Booth. He was one of eight children in his family.
In 1901, Booth attended the Chicago Art Institute and the Art Students League in 1902.
In 1899, at the age of twenty-five, Booth’s first drawing was published in the Indianapolis News in the form of a long poem he had written and embellished around its margins. The newspaper liked his work and continued to print his verse over the next few years, while its staff cartoonist encouraged him to enroll in a formal art school for a bit of training. This Booth did at the Chicago Art Institute, and during the three-month course he took his portfolio to the city’s smaller newspapers, all of whom summarily rejected his work. But he kept at his rounds, and to his surprise sold a drawing to one of the larger Chicago dailies.
In 1901, Booth moved to New York City to expand his career opportunities. He took classes at the Art Students’ League and worked as a newspaper illustrator, and it was in New York he met and became friends with another Indiana native, the writer Theodore Dreiser. The politically liberal Dreiser had already achieved a measure of success with his 1900 novel Sister Carrie, and the two would enjoy a camaraderie that would last decades and even take literary shape in the 1916 book A Hoosier Holiday, illustrated by Booth, which was Dreiser’s account of their road trip back to their home state by automobile.
After the New York newspaper he worked for folded, Booth returned to Indiana and was hired as a staff illustrator for the Indianapolis News. He was lured back to New York City by a promise of work from another paper, but this publication also went bankrupt; fortunately he was under contract to the parent company and was transferred to its other papers in Boston and Washington, DC. After another stint in Indiana in 1904, Booth traveled to Europe with a group of fellow artists, visiting Rome, Paris, and Spain. He was pleased to realize that upon his return, the mere mention of his trip abroad earned him far more jobs than anything else on his resume had to date.
In 1905, Booth began an association with the Indianapolis publisher Bobbs-Merrill, providing headpiece or tailpiece decorations, dust jackets, and illustrations for over a dozen titles. Yet he also returned to Manhattan and resolved to make a living in magazine illustration. He finally broke into the lucrative profession with illustrations for a poem written by his friend, Thomas S. Jones Jr., that appeared in Everybody’s Magazine in 1906. His images for subsequent issues helped win him assignments from McClure’s, Collier’s, Scribner’s, Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post, and Good Housekeeping - all of them among the most popular magazines in the country during this era.
Booth spent time in Indiana each summer, and forged a professional connection with Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley. He illustrated several volumes of Riley’s nostalgic verse, among them Old-Fashioned Roses, published around 1909, and The Flying Islands of the Night, which featured his first color plates for a Bobbs-Merrill title. As Booth’s reputation as an illustrator grew, he was offered other work that furthered his career considerably. He created the images for a 1917 edition of The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain for Harper & Row, and began to accept lucrative assignments for commercial illustration. But it was his collaboration with Dreiser on the 1916 nonfiction book A Hoosier Holiday that made Booth a national celebrity of sorts, since Dreiser was by then quite feted as an American writer and the work was reviewed extensively. With illustrations from Booth, A Hoosier Holiday is Dreiser’s account of their trip back to Indiana as well as their experiences in their home state.
For the commercial illustrations done at the peak of his career in the 1920s, Booth could command $1,500 for a drawing, an enormous sum in the day. He created advertising imagery for a roster of clients that included Montgomery Ward, Underwood Typewriters, Paramount Pictures, and Procter & Gamble; he even did record album covers. In 1925, Booth was honored with an oversized edition issued by the Robert Frank publishing house and Walker Engraving Company. Franklin Booth: Sixty Re-productions from Original Drawings with an Appreciation by Earnest Elmo Calkins and an Introduction by Meredith Nicholson was originally published in a limited edition of 210, each signed by Booth. That same year he became a co-founder of the Phoenix Art Institute, and taught at this New York school for several years. He also wrote about illustration for correspondence course curriculum that the school offered, and this led to his introductory essay for Arthur Guptill’s 1928 work Drawing with Pen and Ink, which would become the classic how-to book for the next few generations of amateur artists. Over the next decade, however, Booth’s pen-and-ink style fell out of favor with magazine editors and commercial art directors as a result of the vast improvements made in the technology of photographic reproduction.
He continued to teach illustration at what later became the New York-Phoenix School of Design until he suffered a stroke in 1946. Booth died two years later in New York City, but was, according to his wishes, cremated and his ashes scattered over his parents’ gravesite in Indiana.
Booth was a member of the Society Illustrators and Guild of Free Lance Artists.
The animals on the farm fascinated Booth from a very young age, and were his first subjects when he took pen to paper as a fledgling artist. From his school textbooks and magazines in the home he copied woodcut or lithographic images, believing them to be just pen-and-ink drawings of a two-dimensional variety, and this accidental training would later lend his own art such a realistic edge.
From 1908 on Booth lived permanently in New York, and made his home and studio in quarters on West 57th Street for much of his career. Despite his urban life, his Indiana farm boyhood was still very much a part of his character, and critics of Booth’s art recognize that his best work came in depicting outdoor landscapes; his interior scenes are thought to be somewhat lacking.
With a foot firmly planted in each world, Booth loved the marvels of modem urban America as well: his automobile was one such passion, though he never actually learned to drive and such trips as he had taken with Dreiser were undertaken by a hired chauffeur. Booth was of the opinion that one could not properly enjoy the landscape while engaged in the actual task of operating an automobile. He was also a great fan of the racing at the Indianapolis Speedway from that venue’s earliest years in existence.
Quotes from others about the person
"I have always admired the beauty of Franklin Booth's work and regard him as an exponent of the very best in American Illustration." - Norman Rockwell
"Booth's pen-and-inks have the lush richness of a fine old tapestry plus an exciting imagination." - James Montgomery Flagg
"I have always stood spellbound before one of Booth's noble pen paintings. They recall today the Golden Age of American Illustration when such giants as Pyle, Abbey, Remington, and Gibson set a standard hard to reach. Booth earned his place beside such men as These." - Dean Cornwell
"I still wish I could do a pen drawing the way Franklin Booth handled them. The present-day student who wants quick success should be forced to copy a few of his illustrations just for the discipline. I used to do them just for the love of it." - Milton Caniff
“Booth attributed the high degree of creativity among some Hoosiers to the magnetism or creative power generated by the soil and light peculiar to the region around Indianapolis. He spoke of the indescribable haze occurring in some July and August days that created a sense of mystery, a spiritual or aesthetic suggestiveness. He related this sense also to the influence of the great forests of maple, beech, poplar, hickory, and oak peculiar to that region.”
In 1923, Booth married Beatrice Wittmack.