I have a thousand or so stories about collecting various art forms. Here is one of them. I picked this up on eBay recently for a nice price (about $160). There was not much interest from the bidders, but I really liked it and a little investigating made it seem as though this was a rather rare drawing. As I have mentioned previously, I fancy these late 19th/early 20th Century illustrators.
Here is what it looked like at the auction site and when I received it.
It was easy enough to find out stuff about Tudor Jenks.
Tudor Storr Jenks (1857-1922) was a lawyer and journalist, and is best remembered for his fiction and non-fiction children’s stories. He studied art in Paris during 1880-81, and returned to the US to practice law. Living in NYC, he took a break from practicing law from 1887-1902 and served as the associate editor for the popular St Nicholas magazine.
How to track down this drawing? By the looks of it, St Nicholas magazine seemed a good place to start. Nothing in the online indices matched this motif, and no illustrations by Jenks that I could find, at all.
When the picture arrived, I unframed it and found this on the back:
That was useful. The Century Company (see logo) published a magazine called The Century Magazine, and Jenks was a frequent contributor. All this stuff has been scanned as part of the Google library project, so I quickly found a searchable index. Century Magazine had a feature called “In Lighter Vein” and it was just a few steps to find an entry titled “On the Road” (see above). Out of the frame, this title was reinforced:
“On the Road” (1900)
by Tudor Storr Jenks (1857-1922)
5 x 6 in., ink
Coppola Collection
The reference showed up in a search:
Tudor Jenks Story
“On the Road”
The Century Magazine
Vol 60, p 319, 1900
And viola!
It is a cute poem. I photoshopped the scan and added the text:
As far as I can tell, this is the only example of his cartooning that has ever surfaced. If there are any Jenks aficionados out there who know more, I would be happy to learn more about his art contributions.