Background
Matthew Morgan was born on April 27, 1839, in Lambeth, London, England. His parents were Matthew Morgan, an actor and music teacher, and Mary Somerville, an actress and singer.
(Excerpt from The American War: Cartoons The chief events...)
Excerpt from The American War: Cartoons The chief events of the great American Civil War, and indicate the various phases of popular thought in Europe connected With that. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
https://www.amazon.com/American-War-Cartoons-Classic-Reprint/dp/1334338043?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1334338043
Matthew Morgan was born on April 27, 1839, in Lambeth, London, England. His parents were Matthew Morgan, an actor and music teacher, and Mary Somerville, an actress and singer.
His parents recognized his talent at an early age and permitted him to study art under Telbin.
Afterwards Morgan worked with Telbin for some years, then painting scenery at the Drury Lane and Princess theatres in London. A natural taste for caricature, however, earned him a connection with the Illustrated London News as artist and correspondent. He also found time to study in Paris, Italy, and Spain. In Spain he painted a number of large watercolors.
In 1858 he traveled to the interior of Africa by way of Algeria, but returned to Europe in 1859 in time to report the Austro-Italian War for the News. His next venture was an association with Frank C. Burnand and William S. Gilbert on the staff of a publication called Fun, in which Morgan's best-known work, his cartoons of the American Civil War, began to appear in 1862. Some of these were published in book form, with the work of others, as The American War, Cartoons (1874).
In 1867 he became owner and illustrator of a paper called the Tomahawk, which, because of his cartoons ridiculing Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales and attacking royalty in general, found little favor in England and soon expired. As a side line he occupied the post of scene-painter to the Royal Italian Opera, Covent Garden.
Frank Leslie, apparently with the intention of pushing Morgan as a rival of Thomas Nast, induced him to come to America in 1870 and work on Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. In New York also, Morgan did scene-painting on the side for several theatre managers.
In 1880 he designed the decorative stone work for the Ledger Building in Philadelphia and shortly after the completion of that work went to Cincinnati as manager of the Strobridge Lithographing Company. While here he founded The Matt Morgan Art Pottery Company and the Cincinnati Art Student's League.
In 1887 he returned to New York and in 1888 became art editor of the new magazine, Collier's Once a Week. Toward the close of his life he seems to have been affected by a desire to do things on a large scale. He painted a number of panoramas of battles of the Civil War, an oil painting thirty by fifteen feet of Christ entering Jerusalem, and a background for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Madison Square Garden, this last work covering 15, 000 square yards of canvas. He died on June 2, 1890, of pericarditis and pleurisy, in New York City.
(Excerpt from The American War: Cartoons The chief events...)
Matthew Morgan was married early in life and had nine children by his first wife; shortly before coming to America he was married a second time, and of this union seven children were born.