 Walter Harrison Cady is primarily known as Harrison Cady
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Harrison Cady was a noted illustrator, born in Gardner, Massachusetts and best known for his works in Bedtime Stories,
a daily-newspaper created by book and magazine writer Thornton W.
Burgess. Burgess conceived the character of Peter Rabbit (not to
be confused with Beatrix Potters creation of the same name), and each
of these Bedtime Stories was illustrated with a drawing by Cady, who had illustrated some of Burgess magazine stories as early as 1911.
Cady
started his art career in the last years of the nineteenth century. He
was better noted at the time for his work in books and magazines and
for his gag cartoons. He also did work as a comic-strip artist,
having begun working in that field for the Philadelphia Press starting in 1905. His first Peter Rabbit newspaper comic feature page appeared on Sunday, August 15, 1920, in the Tribune,
and was later distributed nationally by the New York Herald-Tribune
Syndicate. Despite repeated demands from readers, there never was
a Peter Rabbit daily strip.
In addition to drawing the feature,
Cady also wrote the story lines. At first, he stuck close to
Burgess rustic locales of Green Meadows and Smiling Pool, but he later
transferred his bunny hero to the suburban setting of Carrotville, and
devised stories of his own. A portly, middle-aged white rabbit of
dignified mien, Peter lived in the company of his chubby wife Hepsy and
his two mischievous sons (one or both of who were indifferently called
Peter Jr. or Petey). He was apparently a rabbit of means: he
drove a car, had a large wardrobe, belonged to a country club, and
engaged the services of a maid named Bridget Possum.
Peter and
his offspring always pursued some innocent activity that quickly turned
into full-scale disaster. Peter would knock down an entire row of
houses with his car, or bean a number of players with one golf ball, or
his sons would blow up their classroom in one of their science
experiments. These accidents would inevitably end up with a lynch mob
hot on the culprits heels, brandishing canes, cudgels, baseball bats,
and hockey sticks, and screaming imprecations like "After im, boys,"
"Well fix im," and "Get th villain." Peter and his kids would then make
mile-a-minute tracks back to their house, which they would barricade
against the enraged citizenry.
With the exception of World War
II, which was hard to ignore, Cady seldom let events from the outside
would intrude on the goings-on around Carrotville and its
surroundings. A staunch conservative, he would, however, take
oblique swipes at the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. This
aspect of the strip did not go unnoticed by Coulton Waugh, who wrote in
1947, "Peter himself may be a rabbit, but more precisely he is one of
the earliest comic business fathers, an exceedingly Republican rabbit
forced out to make needless reports on his business."
Cady drew
Peter Rabbit in a more concise version of his minutely detailed style.
The drawings were eye-pleasing, and the frenzied action was rendered
with tongue-in-cheek naturalness. The anecdotes, however, were
repetitious and were criticized as becoming cloying after a while. Cady
retired at age 70, in 1948 (his last page appeared on July 25). Vincent
Fago, a former Max Fleischer animator, succeeded him with somewhat
disastrous results. Fago tried to remake Peter into a Bugs Bunny clone,
but his efforts were critiqued for limp drawings and stale jokes. The
feature, which declined to being carried almost exclusively by the
lonely Herald-Tribune, managed to last until March 11, 1956.
(Information for the biography above is based on writings from the book, 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics, an illustrated encyclopedia edited by Maurice Horn.)
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Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:
| WALTER HARRISON CADY (1877-1970)
Best known for his
illustrations of Peter Rabbit, a character invented in the 1920s by
Thurmond Burgess, Harrison Cady began drawing and sketching as a child
in Gardner, Massachusetts, and enjoyed a long and successful career in
New York City as a magazine and book illustrator. In 1925 he
purchased a harbor-front estate at Rockport, Massachusetts, and turned
his attention to oil painting. He exhibited landscapes and
marines with success at the National Academy of Design in New York, had
solo exhibitions at the Macbeth Gallery, showed at the New York World’s
Fair in 1939, and at Kennedy and Company until 1949.
From the
late 1920s through the 1950s Cady sought out picturesque scenery that
“seemed on the verge of being swept away by modernity,” (Moffatt, 1985,
p. 6), and recorded the faded elegance of such historic sites as
Beaufort and Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and New
Orleans. He was also attracted to mountain scenery, and made
frequent trips to North Carolina, West Virginia and Virginia,
especially during the 1930s when interest in Appalachian subjects was
high. Though he rarely dated or documented his work, A Walk in the Village was probably painted in the mid-1930s, during one of his visits to Ashville.
Cady was especially fond of the nearby towns of Burnsville and Spruce
Pine. The houses were historic and picturesque; the lawns manicured;
the streets dotted with ancient oaks and pines. The rich color of
his palette, and the romantic mood of his compositions assured his
popularity.
Cady’s Southern genre was exhibited at the
Salmagundi Club’s Spring Exhibition in 1950. He was given his
last one-man show by the Fitchburg [Massachusetts] Art Museum as late
as 1964. NRShaw
Moffatt, Dr. Frederick C. Harrison Cady: The Southern Image. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1985.
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Biography from Carolina Galleries - Southern Art:
| Walter Harrison Cady
1877-1970
Walter Harrison Cady was born in 1877 in Gardner, MA. Primarily a magazine and book illustrator, his work was published in LIFE, the Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentleman, and the Ladies Home Journal. Cady's etchings were included in Fine Prints of the Year (1930) and are in the collections of The Library of Congress. He was a member of the American Society of Etchers and the American Watercolor Society. He also exhibited at the National Academy. He died in 1970. |
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Walter Cady is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Illustrators
Cartoonists
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