I’m *loving* Paul C. Tumey’s latest book, The Art of Milt Gross Volume 1: Mastering Cartoon Pantomime – Judge 1923-1924. I’ve become even more interested in this era, when the old comic weeklies are still going, and newspaper comics are just getting started. Gross is a great example, from drawing cartoons for the humor weeklies and moving into newspaper cartooning, an evolution that still has room for exploration and lots of historical work. Several pioneering newspaper comic strip artists either started out with Judge and the like, or grew up reading those publications and carried that influence into their earliest strips. I also enjoyed this book because Gross’s cartoons here are still very funny.
A couple of years ago, I curated an exhibition at the Schulz Museum on some of the comics that Charles Schulz grew up reading in the 1920s and 1930s. While working on that, I got to know the older comics I wasn’t familiar with, including Milt Gross’s newspaper comic Dave’s Delicatessen. But what I saw from that time included some racist caricatures, which, though abhorrent even then, were very widespread. However, in his earlier work found in this volume, his anti-Klan stance is loud and clear. Gross drew a number of comics ridiculing the Klan and their targeting not only of Black Americans, but also of Jewish Americans, like Milt Gross. A brave thing to do in 1920s America.
In his book, Tumey uses this delightful portrait of Gross, which was originally published in the January 24, 1925, issue of Judge. It’s a wonderful construction of photography, cartooning, and photo manipulation. The very funny Three Horses painting on the back wall caught my eye, and it did for Tumey, too. He mentions the repeated appearance of thisThree Horses image in a couple of other cartoons by Gross. One cartoon from June 1924 was published in Judge, and again later, in his comic strip Nize Baby, on October 2, 1928. But there was something familiar to me about it. Something … else.
And then I half-remembered. I’d seen this before. Not the Milt Gross version, but something so similar, I feel they’re probably connected — a print of a painting that hung in some elderly relation’s home. I think it’s quite likely that Gross was lampooning a very famous work of art from the 1840s — A painting by J. H. Herring, Sr., titled “Pharaoh’s Chariot Horses.” Prints of the image were available almost immediately after the paint dried, and they (and knock-offs) remained popular for decades. So much so that these prints had essentially become kitsch by 1900. As affordable color printing became more widespread, cheaper prints of this painting quickly became available. In the original, the horses are all white. In some versions, one or all of the horses’ colors are changed. The original was round, but square and rectangular versions also spread. Herring’s powerful image also became popular as a tattoo design by the 1920s1. I think there’s at least a possibility that Gross is referencing this image and having some fun with it.
After messaging my parents, they remembered it too, which helped me solve my mystery, but it might not solve it 100% for Milt Gross’s reference.
Will Milt Gross’s version now become a tattoo? Time will tell. With Paul C. Tumey’s book (and the rest of his planned series), we will all get to know Gross’s work better, and maybe with more appreciation, we’ll see more of it. I hope so.
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About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.
- Carol Clerk. Vintage Tattoos: A Sourcebook For Old-School Designs and Tattoo Artists. London: Carlton Books Ltd., 2008, pg. 198-201. ↩︎
Historical Fiction for the Historian
