Background
He was born in Brooklyn, New York. His paternal grandfather and his father, Hugo A. Fisher, were both painters of distinction. The latter was his first teacher and was the chief influence in the early development of his talent.
( Harrison Fisher's portraits of healthy, poised, active,...)
Harrison Fisher's portraits of healthy, poised, active, and confident women set the standard for the concept of American beauty during the early years of the twentieth century. The artist enjoyed enormous popularity from 1905 to 1920, serving as a judge in nationwide beauty contests and maintaining a celebrity status that was unparalleled for an illustrator. This original publication recaptures the images that made Fisher famous, compiling his very best black-and-white and color illustrations for Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Ladies Home Journal as well as for books and other publications. The successors to the stylish Gibson Girls created by Charles Dana Gibson, Fisher's idealized women reflect an aspirational degree of wealth and social ease. They ride horses, play tennis, swim, go motoring in newfangled automobiles, and graciously bask in the admiration of attractive young men. These century-old images from a moment in our country's cultural history will appeal to enthusiasts of graphic art and illustration as well as to students of American art and popular culture.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Beauties-Artwork-Harrison-History/dp/0486489108?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0486489108
(THE ALTERNATIVE by George Barr McCutcheon with illustrati...)
THE ALTERNATIVE by George Barr McCutcheon with illustrations by Harrison Fisher. 1909 Hardcover 8 x 5 1/4 inches, 120 pages. A. L. Burt Co. NY
https://www.amazon.com/ALTERNATIVE-McCutcheon-illustrations-Harrison-Hardcover/dp/B000RYKHDE?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000RYKHDE
He was born in Brooklyn, New York. His paternal grandfather and his father, Hugo A. Fisher, were both painters of distinction. The latter was his first teacher and was the chief influence in the early development of his talent.
His talent for sympathetic depiction of high society determined the course of his career in illustration. Further instruction was acquired at art schools in San Francisco, and in England and France.
His beginning as a professional artist was with the San Francisco Call and the San Francisco Examiner, for which he made drawings of accidents, criminal scenes, sporting events, and other phases of the "passing show. " He also drew decorative borders, retouched photographs, and illustrated stories.
This work seemed to him in after life to have been excellent discipline in making clear, direct, accurate drawings. Through this experience with the newspapers Fisher's determination to become an illustrator had been settled and in 1898 he moved to New York, where the opportunities for such a career were greater.
The editors to whom he brought his work soon recognized his special talent, and his thirty-six years of book and magazine illustration began. His drawings first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and Puck.
One of his early book pieces was the cover for Beverly of Graustark by George Barr McCutcheon.
His talent for sympathetic depiction of high society determined the course of his career in illustration. Prolific and successful as he was in this direction, he did not win through it his outstanding reputation--that of the creator of the "Harrison Fisher girl. "
While in France, he had made a sketch of a French girl whose mother, after she had suffered the loss of most of her hair from typhoid fever, had swathed her head in a ribbon tied in a large bow. Fisher so admired this head-dress that he painted a large ribbon and bow on a typical American girl.
The style immediately became popular and had a tremendous vogue for a generation among the girls of America. Fisher became a member of the "girl triumvirate" of illustrators, along with Charles Dana Gibson and Howard Chandler Christy.
His "supernally beautiful and starry eyed girls" presently became familiar all over the world. His friend Christy called him the "king of magazine-cover illustrators. "
Girls flocked to his studio, hoping to be chosen as models by this arbiter of feminine fashion and facial beauty. Letters and photographs arrived by the dozen. He thought that only one girl in a hundred fulfilled the requirements for his generalized and universal American type.
When editors caught him in an attempt to escape from his boredom with pretty girls by etching or painting old women, characters from the streets, sea-lions and cattle, they told him no one would buy "that stuff. "
Within her limits, the glorified girl whom he evolved appealed to the better nature of his public in terms of his emphasis upon healthy living, sports, and refinement. Thus Fisher may be said to have rendered an effective service in a moral sense.
There was never anything vulgar or meretricious in his point of view. Though not consistently sound nor particularly searching, he was a very facile, graceful draftsman. His drawings and illustrations had the life and vitality of rapid workmanship.
His line is light and elegant and his forms are pleasant; never, however, particularly strong and incisive.
He had a vast knowledge of the subject matter he chose to paint and draw. He understood the appurtenances of the rich: their clothes, furnishings, their dogs and horses, drawing-rooms, ballrooms, country clubs and country houses. Light sentiment, romance, and whimsy were part of his makeup.
He worked equally well in pen and ink, charcoal, pencil, water color, and pastel.
He died in the Doctors' Hospital, New York, following an emergency operation.
( Harrison Fisher's portraits of healthy, poised, active,...)
(THE ALTERNATIVE by George Barr McCutcheon with illustrati...)
He was a member of the Society of Illustrators and the Friars in New York and of the Bohemian, his favorite club, in San Francisco.
Simplicity and refinement were, in his estimation, the essence of beauty. Though he believed that character, intelligence, and charm were necessary to feminine loveliness, his own work shows these qualities only in slight degree.
His types were more generalized and his characterizations showed deviations, mostly in choice of clothes and accessories, not in type. This similarity resulted undoubtedly from his desire to depict a national type of girl rather than a specific or regional one, for he was firmly convinced that American history and environment had produced a single general mold of face and feature. Furthermore, since the public became so used to this "Fisher Girl" that they would accept no other from him, he was compelled to repeat himself.
He was a member of the Society of Illustrators and the Friars in New York and of the Bohemian, his favorite club, in San Francisco.
He was throughout his life a retiring person, with few personal friends and an abhorrence of publicity.
Fisher never married. He had seen, he explained, too much of feminine prettiness for it to have any mystery for him.