Fanny
Y. Cory
Reprinted from the “Baum
Bugle” –Spring, 1973
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Cory Publishers, Inc. Home Page
When Fanny Young Cory illustrated L. Frank
Baum's The Master Key in 1901, she was beginning a successful career as
a book, magazine, and newspaper illustrator. Miss Cory said that she "got such a good start in the
field of children's illustration . . . because I was the first woman to try
it. I wasn't as good an artist as
some others, but I had more sense of humor." She was much too modest, for
she was one of the finest illustrators of the early twentieth century.
A decoration by Miss Cory for The
Enchanted Island of yew
Fanny Cory was born in Waukegan, Illinois, On
October 17, 1877. At the age of
fourteen, she moved to Helena, Montana, where she attended school and took art
classes from Mary C. Wheeler. To
earn money to support her ailing sister, she decided to become a professional
artist and in 1895, she moved east to study at the Metropolitan School of Fine
Arts aid the Art Students", League in New York City. She lived in New Jersey with her older
brother, J. Campbell Cory, a political cartoonist and, later, the author of The
Cartoonist's Art, (1912).
The standards at the New York schools were
frightening to a girl whose only training had been in Montana. She later remarked to Mary Wheeler
"... I thought I was quite wonderful, but in New York they didn't think
so. But by 1896, the quality of her work had improved and she decided to try to
sell some drawings to St. Nicholas magazine. She later recalled going through the receptionist's office,
occupied by Tudor Jenks, and thinking in awe of Mary Mapes Dodge, Louisa May
Alcott, and other great authors associated with St. Nicholas. She walked fearfully into the editor's
office; he was impressed with her samples and offered her twelve dollars for
one. "I was taken back,"
she said, "and hesitated to tell him I thought it too much. He kindly
reduced it to ten dollars." Soon she was a regular contributor to Life,
Scribner's Century, Harper's Bazaar, and The Saturday Evening
Post. Her main vehicle,
however, remained St. Nicholas, published by the Century Company, and
she remembered in 1972 that one
day "Mr. Drake (editor of Century) caught up with me going down the
hall … and putting his arm over [my] shoulder asked if [I] knew that [I] was
called 'the Little Sister of the Century Company’." Her illustrations
contributed markedly to the popularity of St. Nicholas. One of Miss Cory's happiest memories was
of a St. Nicholas contest to name the children's favorite artist. "Everybody thought, including me
that it would be [Reginald] Birch … but the children, bless them, voted for
me." But she did have a dispute about one of the magazine's policies: "St.
Nicholas was very pious in those days and I was-sometimes too brazen for
the art editor, I think. I'll
never forget the time they made me lengthen the toga I put on a little Roman
boy in an illustration for a story. My version was too immodest
In
July 1900, her work received the attention of the important magazine “The
Critic" which noted her
excellent use of art nouveau decorations combined with her ability to put puckish
touches of humor into her drawings: "she has fancy, brightness, and
quaintness, and the faculty, which is not to be underestimated, of focusing
these into timelessness and practical use." Her most popular magazine
drawings were of charming children, whose sweetness was tempered by
mischievousness.
Meanwhile,
she was becoming a prolific book artist for many publishers. Her earliest book--at least the
earliest I have seen--Just Rhymes (1899) is too hurriedly illustrated to
be memorable, but Yankee Enchantment and the charmingly titled The
Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts, both published in 1900, are
extremely attractive volumes. The
pen and ink pictures capture the timelessness of the finest art nouveau works,
and a few of them are reminiscent of Howard Pyle.
How
Fanny Cory came to illustrate stories by L. Frank Baum is not known. In 1972, her daughter, Mrs. Sayre
Cooney Dodgson, relayed my questions to Miss Cory, but it is not surprising that she no longer recalled
details of events occurring more than seventy years before. Baum was then living in Chicago, while
the illustrator was still in New Jersey, and it is consequently unlikely that
they ever met. My belief--based on
no evidence whatsoever--is that Baum was so impressed by her work in St.
Nicholas that he asked The Home Magazine to have her illustrate its
story, "The Bad Man." Since the story appeared in February 1901, Miss
Cory must have drawn the pictures at the end of the previous year, when she was
23 years old. Also in 1901, she
illustrated Baum's The Master key.
This book was something of a departure for her; most of the-.line
drawings and plates are of rough and ready teenagers rather than the fantasy
scenes and the infants which she did so well. Her pictures are, nevertheless, very good, but unfortunately
Baum's publisher, Bowen-Merrill, bound the book in a depressing green
cloth--"a binding" writes Russell MacFall in To Please a Child,"
so ugly that even the excellent color plates and text drawings by Fanny Y Cory
did not make it any more alluring to a child's eye."
Miss Cory's next book for L. Frank Baum was The Enchanted Island of
Yew (1903). This was one of a series of books, including The
Pete and Polly Stories (1902),
Daisie and Her Dog Snip in Fairyland (1903), and The Well in the Wood
(1904), in which Fanny Cory produced lovely drawings in muted colors. These books mark, I believe, a high
point in early twentieth century book illustration. The color plates in Yew contain dream-like fairy tale
scenery with often a touch of humor in the characters of the foreground.
Fanny Young Cory --by herself
From the Critic, July 1900
At the end of 1903, probably a few months after completing her
drawings for Yew, she left New Jersey and returned to Montana. The editor of St. Nicholas gave
her a copy of Owen Wister's The Virginian with the remark that she might
soon find her own hero in the West.
He was a prophet, for on April 12, 1904, she married Fred W. Cooney, a
rancher at Canyon Ferry near
Helena. The Cooneys lived on an
1800 acre ranch, where they raised three children, Sayre, Robert, and Ted.
During the early years of her marriage, Miss
Cory continued illustrating books and magazines. Her son, Dr. T. W. Cooney, recalls that she had a studio
decorated with heads of elk, deer, and goat (Fanny Cory was fond of deer
hunting). Often she sketched
outside. As her family grew, she
began withdrawing from regular work and by about 1910, she was illustrating
only those books which had a special appeal to her. Jackieboy In Rainbowland (1911) is beautifully
illustrated, and in 1913, she
produced her finest series of illustrations for The Fanny Cory Mother Goose. The influence of Arthur Rackham, whom
she greatly admired, is evident in her Mother Goose illustrations with their
crowded detail and still muted but now complex use of colors. Probably a few years later Miss Cory
began an ambitious project: a "Fairy Alphabet" in elaborate colors. She always believed that these drawings
were her best work. I have seen
photographs of the pictures and agree with her family that the failure of any
publisher to make them available is a great misfortune.
Click on picture to view larger picture
Fanny Young Cory, 1900-1905
(Courtesy Sayre Cooney Dodgson)
By the middle 1920's, her children were old
enough for college, but because of a depression in the ranching business the
Cooneys could not afford the cost of education. She therefore decided to begin a second career as a newspaper
cartoonist. She contracted with
the Philadelphia Ledger syndicate in 1926 to draw the daily Sonnysayings
cartoons. This series concerned
the misadventures of a little boy and his comments--or excuses. Her drawings are much like her. earlier
St. Nicholas pictures, but with a tendency toward sketchier
shading. Sonny was very
popular, and in 1929 Fanny Cory wrote a book about him. On June 22, 1935, King Features began distributing the series. Later that year, the syndicate hired her
to draw illustrations for Little Miss Muffet, a strip which successfully
capitalized on the popularity of Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie. Miss Cory was a much better artist than
Gray, but she never enjoyed the Muffet series. Except during its last few months, she did not write the
stories, and three years after she began the strip she complained to an
interviewer, "there are no gangsters, or divorces or anything like that in
her adventures, so she must be a relief to mothers. But sometimes I think she's too pure." Despite Miss
Cory's feelings, Little Miss Muffet was popular enough to have a book of
her own.
Fanny Cory's frontispiece for The book of Saints and Friendly Beasts
While working for newspapers, Fanny Cory
wrote and illustrated a book filled with gentle humor about children. Typical of her verses in Little Me (1936)
is the following:
If God wouldn't keep his eye on me,
Day out and day in,
There's a lot of fun I'd have
Living in sin.
In 1956, when she was nearing the age of 80 and afflicted with arthritis and failing
eyesight, she decided to retire.
On June 30, the final episodes of Little Miss Muffet and Sonnysayings
appeared. She still loved Montana,
which had reciprocated by naming her Mother of the Year in 1951, but she
decided to move away. Her husband
had died in 1946 and her home was soon to be flooded by the Canyon Ferry Dam.
She moved to Camano Island, Washington, to be near her daughter and son-in-law,
Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Dodgson. For a
number of years, she lived alone before spending her final days with the
Dodgsons in Stanwood, Washington.
Though her physical problems increased, her mind remained sharp. She died on July 28, 1972, two and a
half months before her 95th birthday.
The above decorations are
examples of Miss Cory's work for The Enchanted Island of Yew
Fanny Y. Cory was one of America’s great
illustrators, and I consider it a great privilege to have been able to record
her recollections during her last year.
--DOUGLAS G. GREENE
Much of the information in this article is from Miss Cory's family,
Mrs. Sayre Cooney Dodgson, Mr. Robert Cooney, and Dr. T. W. Cooney. I am grateful for their kindness and
assistance.
D.G.G.
A Preliminary Checklist of
Her Illustrated Books
By Fanny Young Cory, 1877-1972
Loomis, Charles Battell. Just Rhymes. New York: R. H. Russell, 1899.
Brown, Abbie Farwell. The Book of Saints and Friendly
Beasts. Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin, 1900.
Loomia, Charles Battell. Yankee Enchantments. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1900.
Reid, Sydney. Josey and the Chipmunk. New York: Century, 1900.
Baum, L. Frank. The Master Key.
Indianapolis: Bowen-Merrill, 1901.
Tappan, Eva March. Old Ballads in Prose. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901.
Brown, Abbie Farwell. A Pocketful of Posies. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin; 1902.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1902.
Daskam,
Josephine Dodge. The Madness of
Philip and Other Tales
of Childhood. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1902.
Wells,
Carolyn. The Pete and Polly
Stories. Chicago: A. C.
McClurg, 1902.
Baum,
L. Frank. The Enchanted Island of Yew. Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill,
1903.
Loomis,
Charles Battell. Cheerful
Americans. New York: Henry
Holt, 1903. Illustrated by Cory and others.
Musson, Bennet. Maisie and Her Dog Snip in Fairyland. New York: 1903.
Bowman, Rowland C. Freckles and Tan, A Book
of Humorous Verse. Chicago:
Rand, McNally, 1904.
Daskam,
Josephine Dodge. The Memoirs of
a Baby. New York: Harper, 1904.
FarJeon,
B. L. Lucy and their Majesties, a Comedy in Wax. NewYork: Century,
1904. Illustrated by F.Y. Cory and
George Varian.
Loomis, Charles Battell. More Cheerful Americans. New York: Henry Holt, 1904. Illustrated by Cory and others. Reprinted by Holt in 1907 under the
title Poe's "Raven" in an Elevator and Other Tales.
Taylor,
Bert Leston. The Well in the
Wood. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1904.
Wells, Carolyn. Folly for the Wise. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1904. Illustrated by Cory and others.
Indian Stories Retold from St. Nicholas.
New York: Century, 1905 Illustrated by Cory and others.
Johnson, Burgas. Pleasant Tragedies of Childhood. Now York: Harper, 1905.
Our Baby Book. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1907.
Butler, Ellis Parker. The Confessions of a Daddy. New York: Century, 1907.
Gates,
Josephine Scribner. Sunshine
Annie. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1910.
Hill, William L. Jackieboy in Rainbowland. Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1911.
The Fanny Cory Mother Goose.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1913.
Cory, Fanny Y. "Ben Bolt," The
Kid that You Were Yourself.
Chicago: The Publishers Feature Bureau, 1916. A collection of episodes for a proposed cartoon series,
distributed in pamphlet form to interested newspapers. It is not known whether the cartoons
actually were published in newspapers.
Muter, Gladys Nelson. About Bunnies. Chicago: P. F. Volland, 1924.
Cory, Fanny Y. Sonny Savings. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929.
Cory, Fanny Y. Little Me. New York: Dutton, 1936.
Cory, Fanny Y. Little Miss Muffet.
Racine: Whitman, 1936. Big Little
Book #1120, "based on the famous comic strip," and copyrighted by
King Features Syndicate.
-DOUGLLS G. GREENE
I am indebted to the following people for
contributing information appearing in the checklist: Ruth Berman, Robert
Cooney, T. W. Cooney, Irene Fisher, David A. Hardie, Glen Hunter, Ruth McKee,
and Dick Martin.
D.G.G.
This example of the Sonnysayings
series is reproduced from the original drawing made available by Mr. Robert
Cooney. It was published Oct. 27, 1927.
This page was created by Fanny Young Cory’s grandson –Bob Dodgson
Email comments, questions to dodgsonr@yahoo.com
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