Background

He was born on April 24, 1880 at Coban, Guatemala. Christened Anthony Frederick, he was one of two sons and three daughters of Francis Charles Sarg, a German coffee and sugar planter, and his English wife, Mary Elizabeth Parker. Growing up in an English-speaking household, he spent his early years on the family plantation.

Education

He received a musical education from his father, a strict disciplinarian. At the age of seven he was sent to school in Darmstadt, Germany, and at fourteen to the Prussian military academy at Lichterfelde, near Berlin.

Career

Upon graduating, in 1899, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the German army. Sarg resigned his commission in 1905 and went to England, where he later became a naturalized citizen.

He had always enjoyed drawing, although he had no formal artistic training, and he saw humor in everything around him. Putting his natural talent to use, he first obtained a job making sketches for an advertising agency, then began selling jokes with illustrations to humor magazines. He also became a theatrical artist for the Sketch.

On one of his assignments for this magazine he encountered the marionette show of Thomas Holden, then the largest and most famous in Europe. Sarg was fascinated by the puppets, read all he could find on the subject in the British Museum, and repeatedly watched Holden's performances until he had mastered the mechanics involved.

He then began to design his own marionettes. For a studio he rented an old building reputed to be the "Old Curiosity Shop" Dickens had made famous, fitted out one room as "Little Nell's bedroom, " complete with a four-poster bed and a collection of antique toys, and charged admission. The fees helped pay the rent, and the studio was the scene of his first marionette performances.

With the outbreak of World War I, Sarg as a former officer in the German army found his position in England uncomfortable, and in 1915 he moved with his family to New York City. He became an American citizen in 1921. He easily found work as a cartoonist, his first assignment being to illustrate a Saturday Evening Post series by Irvin S. Cobb, later published as "Speaking of Operations" (1915).

In his studio on the top floor of the Flatiron Building, one of New York's first skyscrapers, Sarg also made marionettes, and he and his colleagues, began giving performances for their friends.

His creations attracted the notice of the theatrical producer Winthrop Ames, who was planning a marionette show for his children's matinees. He commissioned Sarg to stage three playlets: Franz von Pocci's The Three Wishes and The Green Suit and Hamilton Williamson's A Stolen Beauty and the Great Jewel. The Ames production in 1916 was an artistic success, but the expense of mounting it - the three-foot-tall marionettes required special operators, and actors were hired to speak the lines - made it a financial failure.

In an expanded studio and workshop, occupying two floors of a small Greenwich Village apartment building, Sarg began to make smaller puppets whose lines would be spoken by their operators. A short road tour proved this method workable, and in 1920 he formed the Tony Sarg Company to give marionette shows in New York and on tour. He employed able creative talent to write and compose for his marionettes, and over the next decade his shows attained great popularity. His plays - The Mikado, Uncle Remus, Robinson Crusoe, and others continued to be given for years.

Besides his theatrical presentations, Sarg created marionette shows for night clubs, such as the Club Bal Tabarin at Chicago's Sherman Hotel and his own Tony Sarg's Bohemia in New York. His industrial show for the A & P food-store chain at the Chicago World's Fair of 1933 played to millions of persons, and thousands more saw his special shows at New York's Roxy Theatre and elsewhere.

Sarg meanwhile continued his work as a designer and illustrator. His double-page spreads in the Saturday Evening Post and Time magazine drew top prices. Besides illustrating books for others, he wrote and illustrated nearly a dozen of his own, including Tony Sarg's Book for Children - from Six to Sixty (1924) and Tony Sarg's New York (1926).

He produced animated films and designed Christmas window displays for department stores. One of his most memorable creations, for Macy's department store in New York, was the collection of giant animal balloons that for years was a feature of its Thanksgiving Day parades. He also painted murals for cocktail lounges and restaurants, whose walls came alive with dozens of tipsy giraffes, hippopotami, pigs, and chickens, or with a historic city landscape.

During the depression years Sarg's marionette shows were less successful on tour, and the use of photography diminished the demand for his drawing talent. He went bankrupt in 1939 and was forced to sell most of his marionettes and their equipment, although he continued to write and illustrate books for children.

He died in New York's Manhattan General Hospital shortly before his sixty-second birthday, of peritonitis following a ruptured appendix.

Achievements

• Though Sarg's illustrations were widely enjoyed, his most important influence was on puppetry. He is known as "America's Puppet Master". Breaking with the "little people" style of marionettes he had encountered in Europe, he developed three-dimensional caricature and made artful use of animal characters. His style set the direction of American puppetry for half a century. Sarg also drew humorous illustrations for different magazines such as Collier's, Cosmopolitan, and Red Book; his fine draftsmanship and distinctive, lively style won him an appreciative audience. Among his famous plays were Rip Van Winkle, Don Quixote, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland and others.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Up & Down New York (New York Bound Books)

    (Originally published in 1926, Up & Down New York is an im...)

  • Tony Sarg's book for children from six to sixty

    (A delightful, beautifully illustrated children's book wit...)

  • Another Treasury of Plays for Children (Hardcover) 1927

    (1927 HARDCOVER)

  • The Tony Sarg Marionette Book

Personality

He was a man of boundless energy who loved to keep busy. He was stocky and muscular of build.

Connections

On Jan. 20, 1909, Sarg married Bertha Eleanor McGowan of Cincinnati, Ohio, whom he had first met when he was an officer and she a tourist in Germany. They had one child, Mary Eleanor Norcliffe.

Father:

Francis Charles Sarg

Mother:

Mary Elizabeth Parker

Spouse:

Bertha Eleanor McGowan

child:

Mary Eleanor Norcliffe

child:

Norcliffe

They had one child, Mary Eleanor Norcliffe.

colleague:

Charles E. Searle

colleague:

Frank Godwin

References

• Tony Sarg: Puppeteer in America, 1915-1942