Alonzo Myron Kimball

After 1914, Kimball began applying his talents increasingly to commercial advertising, which included designing theatrical posters for the film company Pathé and illustrating newspaper and magazine promotions for a variety of products.

• Name — Alonzo Myron Kimball • Born — 14 August 1874 • Birthplace — Green Bay, Wisconsin United States • Died — 27 August 1923 • Place of death — Evanston, Illinois United States • Occupation — Portrait painter, illustrator • Years Active — 18941923 • Spouses — Madeleine "Medley" Williams (m. 1902his death) • Children — 1, son Alonzo Weston Kimball (19051977)

Born in 1874 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Alonzo was the younger of two sons of Myra Barnes (née Mahan) and Alonzo Weston Kimball, a native of Massachusetts, who later became a very successful, highly paid insurance executive in Chicago. In 1882, when Alonzo was only eight years old, his mother died. Two years later his father married Ella Celestia Peak of Otsego, New York, and they resided in Evanston, Illinois, located a short distance north of downtown Chicago. Alonzo demonstrated a keen interest and ability in art as a child. Later, during the early 1890s, he studied drawing and painting at the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan, and in 1894 he traveled to Europe to study with several renown artists. In France, Kimball trained with Jules Lefebvre at the Académie Julian in Paris, with Gustave Courtois, and in 1899 he exhibited at the Salon at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He was also greatly influenced by the work of fellow American artist James McNeil Whistler. That influence was likely gained in Paris as well, at the Académie Carmen, an art school that Whistler founded in the French capital in 1898 and operated there until the facility's closure in 1901.

• Illustration — One of eight covers Kimball produced for The Saturday Evening Post between 1907 and 1911 In 1902, after returning to the United States from Europe, Kimball married and he and his wife Madeleine lived briefly in Evanston before they relocated to New York City. There he established himself professionally, quickly gaining a reputation for excellence in portraiture, especially for his oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels of female subjects or "American Beauties". He was commissioned for such works by both private and corporate clients, including major publishers. While still continuing his portrait work, Kimball also became one of the nation's leading illustrators during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Between 1903 and his death in 1923, he illustrated books for many of the nation's top writers. He also produced eight front covers for Saturday Evening Post as well covers and illustrations for assorted short stories and articles in other widely read weeklies and monthlies in the United States. Among those periodicals are Scribner's Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Holland's, Collier's, Metropolitan, Judge, The Ladies Home Journal, and "Sunday Magazine", which was a regular syndicated supplement to Sunday editions of The Boston Post, the New-York Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and various other newspapers across the country in the early 1900s.

• Illustration — Painting by Kimball in soap advertisement, 1916 Between 1905 and the early 1920s, Kimball's artwork was used in newspaper and magazine advertisements throughout the United States to sell cameras, soaps, Torrington vacuum cleaners, men's and women's clothing, and a host of other products. An early example of Kimball's illustrations in advertising is an upperclass family scene he drew specifically for Kodak, one that shows children unwrapping one of the company's box cameras next to a Christmas tree. The advertisement with this illustration is in the December 2, 1905, issue of Collier's. In commercial advertising, clothing became Kimball's forte. Two examples of his work in that area are his depiction of a man fashionably attired in a 1909 newspaper advertisement for D. J. Kaufman's "The Men's Store" in Washington, D.C., and a large illustration that same year of a smartly dressed couple in a newspaper advertisement for "The Home of Quality Clothes", the King-Swanson Company of Omaha, Nebraska. The Detroit-based business Weil & Company, a large furniture retailer that also publicized itself as "outfitters" for men and boys, announced in newspapers in April 1911 that "one of America's most prominent illustrators" had agreed to furnish the store a series of original artwork for its advertisements. "Mr. Kimball", Weil & Company noted, "is particularly excellent in his delineation of men, creating strong types of unique character and individuality." One more example of Kimball's commercial work is a far more elaborate, full-color 1916 advertisement that includes his painting of a young woman and her attentive male companion to promote John H. Woodbury's facial soap. Published in The Ladies Home Journal and in other periodicals, the "A skin you love to touch" advertisement offered readers a cake of soap with a print of Kimball's "new" painting "ready for framing" for "ten cents in stamps or coin" ($ today) • Illustration — Kimball's theatrical poster for The Red Circle (1915) By 1915, Kimball's commercial success as a portrait artist and illustrator had drawn the interest of executives in America's rapidly expanding motion picture industry. Pathé, a film studio with production facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey, contracted Kimball to design theatrical posters for some of the company's releases and to sketch portraits of the studio's most popular female stars at the time, including Pearl White, Florence Reed, Jackie Saunders, Jeanne Eagels, and Ruth Roland. Kimball's likenesses" of those actresses proved to be so well received by moviegoers that Pathé offered individual copies and sets of his drawings for sale. In December 1915, the New York trade publication The Moving Picture World announced the studio's intentions: Kimball continued his work in commercial advertising in the years just prior to his death. By 1920, he and his wife Madeleine had moved from New York City to Ohio, where they lived in downtown Cleveland in an apartment building on Euclid Avenue. In the federal census for that year, Alonzo confirms his occupation in Cleveland, simply identifying it as "Artist/Advertising".

• Illustration — Kimball's views on fashion in The Evening World, 1912 One other commercial by-product of Kimball's artistic training and success as an illustrator and portrait painter was the development of his reputation nationwide as an expert in haute couture and in upper- and middle-class daily apparel for both men and women. Given his artist's eye for detail and the fact that the vast majority of the subjects in his paintings and drawings were portrayed in the most current and expertly tailored clothing, Kimball gained over the years a keen sense of style and practical experience depicting subjects of different body types in attire that he deemed the most flattering. That ability was greatly enhanced by his work in advertising, especially for large and select clothing establishments. By 1912, Kimball's fashion advice and commentaries on the latest trends in men's and women's apparel were being featured and widely quoted in newspapers and magazines. In a newspaper interview with columnist Marguerite Mooers Marshall in March 1912, Kimball shared his opinions about the basic deficiencies in the styling of women's clothing at that time, most notably in their excesses. "'The freakish fashions of today are quite indefensible'", he observed, adding "'And yet I don't know that even the hobble is as bad as the hoop-skirt used to be.'" As an artist whose commissioned oil portraits needed to remain appealing to viewers for generations, Kimball chose clothing for his female subjects that had simple, timeless lines. He therefore preferred selections of attire in 1912 that, in his words, "'could have been worn equally well in the year 1812, and, presumably, in 2012.'" The following year, in a feature in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch highlighting his ideas about summer fashions, he recommended that more women should forego the norm of wearing heavier, fully enclosed shoes and enjoy instead the cooler comfort of sandals. Kimball also advised both men and women in 1913 to wear more white linen suits for "'artistically effective'" reasons as well as for improved comfort in the seasonal heat. "'White linens for either sex'", he explained, "'show off excellently against a background of green grass or blue ocean.'"

Kimball's standing in art circles and his popularity with the reading public had achieved sufficient status by 1907 that at least one man took advantage of his celebrity and for many months successfully impersonated the artist. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post in March 1908 reported the hoax, which was perpetrated on the most prominent citizens of Asheville and Hendersonville, North Carolina. In a news item titled "Tricked Society Set", The Post on March 13 shared with its readers a report from Asheville about the imposter: The number of towns visited by the "imitation" Kimball and the duration of his fraud remain undetermined, although it was also reported that in the fall of 1907 he stayed briefly in Edneyville, North Carolina, where he "skipped out" on his $14 food bill ($ today) and absconded with a shotgun and a prized hunting dog named "Shell". It is also undetermined whether the man's visits were limited to North Carolina. Additional reports in North Carolina in 1908 state that the man, whose real identity remained unverified, also spent the summer and early autumn of 1907 in Hendersonville, but his travels prior to that are unknown. The pretender, however, quickly disappeared after March 1908, once it was announced in the press that the real Alonzo Kimball in New York responded to telegraphic inquiries and categorically denied ever being in North Carolina. • Illustration — Kimball painting at his home in New York City, 1905

Kimball married only once, in 1902, to Iowa native Madeleine Williams. She and Alonzo remained together until his death, and during their marriage they had one child, son Weston, who was born on November 9, 1905, in Flushing, New York. Kimball's health in the spring of 1923 began to decline considerably over several months due to cardiovascular disease. Although he and Madaleine were still residing in Cleveland that year, Alonzo died from a heart attack in August in Evanston, Illinois, while visiting his stepmother Ella Celestia Kimball. He was survived by his wife, his 17-year-old son, and his half-sister Marjorie (née Kimball) Hall. In its August 28 obituary for Kimball, The New York Times reports that after funeral services were held for the artist in Evanston, his body was transferred to Cooperstown, New York, for cremation.

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