Arthur Ignatius Keller was born in 1866 (or '67 - both dates appear in the reference material) to a generation between Howard Pyle and his pupils. His father was an engraver and encouraged Keller to be an artist. He was born in New York City and studied art at the National Academy of Design there when he was 17. At the age of 20, he appeared in a few issues of St. Nicholas magazine - a monthly magazine for children published by The Century Co. It seems that illustration was not his first love and those few drawings marked the beginning and the end of an early career. He wanted to paint.
Europe
was still the place for an artist to study and in 1890 he went to Germany and
the Munich Academy of Art. The Romantics were still in full force
at the end of the 19th century and the Biedermeier style was the predominant
German version of classical academia. For almost two years Keller studied with
the artist and teacher, Ludwig von Loefftz. The academic style would remain with
him his entire career, as would the very solid foundation of drawing skills that
were stressed in almost every European art education.
When he
returned to New York in 1891, he was prepared for a career as a painter, but it
didn't last. His work appears in the original Life in 1894 and 1895, and
in February of 1897, the image at right appeared in Harpers Monthly,
signaling a complete conversion to illustration. The same year his art (the
image at left) appeared in a book, Let Us Follow Him by Sienkiewicz, who
had just made a major impact with his Quo Vadis.
Appearing in the same issue of Harpers were Howard Pyle, A.B. Frost, Frederic Remington, George du Maurier, Peter Newell and others. The year before, Pyle had started teaching illustration classes at the Drexel Institute. Within five years the illustration field would be crowded with his students. During these five years, Keller made his own mark. He appeared regularly in every major magazine of the day: The Century, Harpers, Scribners, Colliers, McClures and sporadically in many others. And by the end of those five years, in 1903, he was president of the Society of Illustrators, which had just been formed in 1901.
Keller
is often classified as "another society artist" and, while he was very capable
of documenting the same material as
Christy
and Fisher and dozens of other lesser talents, he was much more than that. While
they filled the little gift books of the day with drawing room damsels and
well-dressed swains, Keller was equally at home depicting the outdoors type as
in the drawing at left from Bret Harte's Her Letter. Most of the "society
artists" focused on the figures and fashions with little effort being applied to
surroundings and backgrounds. Keller could do figures with the best of them, but
his characters were firmly situated in perfectly rendered rooms that were often
as visually interesting as the people. See the
image from George Barr McCutcheon's A Fool and His Money (1913) right for
a prime example.
While
he continued to paint and draw for magazines throughout the decade, he turned
more and more to book illustration. His sumptuous style and his strong drawing
skills made his work always in demand. He was equally at ease in color or wash,
oils or pencil. The range of his images always amazes me. At left is the plate
he contributed to the 1911 Society of Illustrators Annual. It's
indicative of the extensive pencil studies he did for every illustration.
Below
are a few images from books from the 1905-1915 era.
Bob Hampton of Placer by Randall Parrish (1906) |
The Calling of Dan Matthews by Harold Bell Wright (1909) |
|
He illustrated for almost all of the popular authors of his day: George Barr McCutcheon, Robert W. Chambers, Owen Wister (he did the illustrations for The Virginian), William Allen White, Meredith Nicholson, Gilbert Parker, Emerson Hough, Irving Bacheller, Joseph Vance, Mary Johnston, and dozens more. His images literally sparkled with light and his attention to detail and faithfulness to the manuscripts was appreciated by both readers and writers.
My
favorite Keller images are not book or magazine illustrations but the studies
that he made for them. In 1920 Keller assembled hundreds of his preliminary
drawings and sketches and photographed them. From the glass negatives that
resulted, he prepared two portfolios of photographic prints. These were
published as A Series of American Monographs * Arthur I. Keller - Figure
Studies From Life. The prints were about 11"x13" and volume one had forty
plates similar to the one at left. I've loaded a full-size version of this plate
so you can see his work and technique up close. Be aware that the file is 182KB
and will take some time to load. They merit close and repeated examination.
Keller died in 1924 and the Society of Illustrators hosted a memorial exhibition in 1925. Many of his drawings were donated to the Library of Congress and might still be there today. He was elected to the SI Hall of Fame in 1989.
Information supplied by: http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/keller.htm