Monday, August 22, 2022

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part 21


 

When illustrator Mead Schaeffer was a teenager, he fell in love with a girl in his art class, Elizabeth Wilson Sawyers. He nicknamed her "Toby" because she posed for illustrations for the book, Toby Tyler.

When Schaeffer turned 20, he quit art school (giving up his full scholarship) to marry Toby and start work.  The couple moved into a 6th floor walk up in New York City where they formed a team.  

Work was sparse and times became hard.   Then Schaeffer landed his first big break-- illustrating the book Moby Dick-- for the publisher Dodd, Mead.  

Years later on Christmas day he confided to his children that he nabbed that first project by snooping around the desk of the art director and discovering that the assignment was about to go to N.C. Wyeth.  Schaeffer intercepted the project by volunteering to paint the first 6 illustrations for free.  "If any of the staff did not like the work... all bets would be off and...they would owe me nothing." The startled art director agreed to the test and handed Schaeffer the manuscript.  Schaeffer wrote about bringing that first manuscript home to his wife:  


Toby became his model, consulted on the art, advised on his layouts, took reference photos and became the business manager for the team. Schaeffer began keeping a scrapbook of his work, and devoted the very first page to a large photograph of Toby. 


Over a long career, Toby modeled for many of his illustrations.



The couple traveled all over the world together on illustration assignments.  When Schaeffer was commissioned to illustrate Les Miserables, he and Toby sailed to France to "follow in the footsteps" of the characters.  Here is the beginning of their trip:


Schaeffer wrote, "I got permission to go into the sewers of Paris and looked up old records.  We returned home with costumes, books on Paris in 1848 and sketches. We returned home with wonderful experiences but very broke."

Schaeffer thought it was important to visit the sites of his paintings, walk the streets and breathe the air.  He and Toby traveled to the south seas to illustrate the book Typee.  They traveled to Europe.  And for a series of covers for The Saturday Evening Post they traveled all around the United States. 


Here are Toby and Schaeffer embarking on another illustration trip in later years:


Traveling in those days was not without its perils.  The couple sailed to Asia on the Orient Overseas line, and received this certificate when crossing the international date line.  


The couple flew back to the US, but their ship got caught in a typhoon on the return trip and sank with all aboard. 

Toby passed away in 1973.  Shortly after that, Schaeffer retired.  He hand lettered an inscription about her and taped it into his scrapbooks:
 
               

Compare Schaeffer's lettering on that last inscription with his lettering earlier in his career: 


By the 1970s, his classical, stately design and colors had been replaced by neon colors applied in an offbeat script on trendy paper.  Apparently Schaeffer was trying to keep up with the times, even though he said, 

The art of illustration has gone to hell, that's for sure.... I lived in the golden age.  Now the photographer is more important than the illustrator.  I'm not knocking photography but in my day you had to learn to draw better than they could take pictures. 

For the graphologists in the audience, Schaeffer's lettering in his final years looks more feeble and uncertain.  His outlines falter.  But it seems the feelings he expressed remained undiminished. 


11 comments:

  1. I went back to read your other stories about artists in love. You're very romantic.

    JSL

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  2. Lovely post David, thank you.

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  3. Enjoyed reading this, thank you.

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  4. They did not have any children?

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  5. Li-An-- actually, Schaeffer did have daughters, and because Schaeffer lived right next to Norman Rockwell, Schaeffer's daughters were used as models in a number of Rockwell's better known covers. This modeling relationship ended when Rockwell inadvertently exposed the home address of Schaeffer's daughter Lee to hundreds of lovesick GIs during WW II. ( https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/11/art-post-rockwell-cover-led-marriage/ ). Toby did NOT have a sense of humor about that. And if you remember the famous Rockwell cover about the two girls dressed in white trying to change a tire while a shiftless man watches from his porch, those were the Schaeffer girls.

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  6. @David Apatoff : another sweet love story :-) I wonder how they managed the girls when travelling.

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  7. This modeling relationship ended when Rockwell inadvertently exposed the home address of Schaeffer's daughter Lee to hundreds of lovesick GIs during WW II.

    I'm confused now. The 'Changing a Tire' (Schaeffer Girls) cover came out over two years after the 'Lee Sleeping' cover that had the Schaeffer's home address on it. (I think Schaeffer's wife got mad, justifiably, but didn't utterly cut off Rockwell from using them as models.)

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  8. Kev Ferrara-- An excellent point, and one that escaped my attention. Before the Schaeffer family turned over his scrapbooks to me, Schaeffer's son in law (in his 90s) went through and paper clipped little note cards with background information, including that the Schaeffer girls were the models for the tire changing. But I also taped an interview with Schaeffer's son in law and Schaeffer's daughter Lee, in which they told me that Toby was so angry at Rockwell that she cut off their modeling arrangement. We can't get clarification because the daughter and her husband have now both passed away. I suspect you're right, that Toby softened with the passage of time. They were, after all, next door neighbors in a remote area of Vermont and shared social and professional bonds.

    In Rockwell's autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, he he gives us a flavor of his relationship with Schaeffer in Vermont, and those long, slow afternoons before TV or even radio. The two illustrator friends worked next door to each other through the formative stages of their careers. Schaeffer would come over and steal feathers from Rockwell's stuffed owl to use as fishing lures. At the end of a long day of painting, the friends would get together for drinks on the lawn and compare notes on how their work had gone that day. (It used to bother Rockwell that Schaeffer could paint three figures in the time it took Rockwell to paint one.) Rockwell always called Schaeffer's wife "Elizabeth." I gather that the nickname Toby was reserved for Schaeffer himself.



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  9. How far back do these scrapbooks go?

    Do they, perchance, go back to his days studying under either Dunn or Cornwell? Which is by way of asking, are there any notes on art, composition, expression... any teaching materials? Any visual diagrams?

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  10. Thousands of Schoonover photos (work & personal):

    https://digital.hagley.org/Schoonover

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  11. Kev Ferrara-- Sadly they do not. I don't think Schaeffer had the money or the confidence to buy these handsome 14 x 17 binders back in those early years. I'm guessing he decided that he had a career worth organizing and memorializing in the early 1930s, and went back to glue in his tear sheets and memorabilia in chronological order.

    George Freeman-- Thanks. It would be interesting to go back through the Schoonover catalogue raisonné to see where some of these reference photos ended up.

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