Charles Graham

An itinerant, self-taught sketch artist for Harper & Brothers, Charles Graham was born in Rock Island, Illinois, and his drawings were in nearly every issue of Harper's from 1880 to 1992. His most favored subject was town views.

Before working for Harper's, Graham was a painter of theater backdrops in Chicago and then hired out as a topographer for the Northern Pacific Railroad survey. He was present when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1883, and covered the subject of railroads extensively for Harper's.

In the fall of 1884, he traveled to New Orleans with John Durkin and made a sketch of the city as an illustration of the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition that was being held there. In 1886, he returned to New Orleans and from there took an extensive tour of Southern states. An 1887 illustration by Graham of Yellowstone National Park appeared in Harper's Weekly, but it was a work created from his Chicago studio and not on site. Between 1883 and 1896, he was active in San Francisco and was a member there of the Bohemian Club and the San Francisco Art Association where he frequently exhibited.

At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, he was the Director of Color and did the same thing the following year in California at the Midwinter Fair. In 1896, he returned to New York but continued to send paintings back to the San Francisco Art Association for exhibition.

After leaving Harper's, Graham worked as a freelance illustrator and after 1900 was an oil painter.

Sources:

John Mahe II, Encyclopedia of New Orleans Artists

Peter Hassrick, Drawn to Yellowstone

Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940

Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:

"Little Charlie Graham," as fellow-artist W. A. Rogers referred to him, was born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1852. He had no formal art training. At twenty-one he was a topographer for the Northern Pacific Railroad's survey of Montana and Idaho. The "Minnesota Journal" later recalled that Graham was "a young man, very short of stature, inclined to corpulency, who waddled along. . . making maps."

Beginning in 1874 he painted scenery for theatres in Chicago and New York. By June, 1877, he was a staff artist for "Harper's Weekly", a post he retained until 1892. During those years he produced hundreds of works which appeared in nearly every issue, including inaugurations, conventions and city views.

From 1880 to 1889 he produced 120 views of the Far West. In 1883 he was sent there to draw scenes of the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad. He made a winter trip to Yellowstone in 1887 with photographer Frank J. Haynes. He also drew scenes of Denver. In 1890 he did sketches from the Dakotas to New Mexico.

Graham was no romantic. He disdained views of the grandeur of nature, preferring scenes that showed development, the march of progress and the taming of the wilderness. In 1886 he toured the South along with Horace Bradley (q.v.), producing drawings for a series of supplements to "Harper's Weekly" on the 'New South.' His gouache-en grisaille "Pig Iron Scene, Birmingham, Alabama" appeared as a two-page wood engraving in the supplement of March 26, 1887. The supplement featured Birmingham, and Graham's picture depicted perfectly its claim to the "Pittsburgh of the South."

Graham exhibited frequently at the American Watercolor Society between 1879 and 1891, by which time he was back in New York. His studio miraculously escaped damage from a fire in his building. Harper's Weekly wrote that "The destruction of Mr. Graham's studio, with its Fittings, would have been a great and irreparable loss, containing as it does his large collection of quaintly curious relics and models. Here he deeps the scraps and portfolios of twenty years of artistic work in a wide and varied field, many of the drawings depicting scenes of western frontier life in an epoch now passed. With these is a large amount of fresh material gathered in Western journeyings through the past summer and autumn for "Harper's Weekly".

In 1893 Graham left "Harper's Weekly" to become a freelance artist. He contributed to the "New York Herald", "Chicago Tribune", "Collier's" and the American Lithograph Company. His last submissions to "Harper's Weekly" were views of Cuba in 1898.

In 1893 Graham was named official artist of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. From 1893 to 1896 he lived in California, where he joined the famous Bohemian Club, and sketched the San Francisco Mid-winter Fair in 1894. He returned to New York in 1896. In the last decade of his life he turned to painting European scenes in oils.

He died in New York in 1911.

THE SOUTH ON PAPER: LINE, COLOR AND LIGHT, Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc., Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1985, page 41.Copyright 1985 Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc.

This essay and its contents are the property of Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc. and may not be reproduced in part of in full without express written permission.