Artists' Hands

A delicately drawn rose, unsigned
but clearly in Arthur's hand

Although the production of the brother’s histories, stories, catalogues, and gazetteers was a collaborative endeavor, in many cases the author and artist of individual books can be identified, and the hands of Elmer, Arthur, and Walter thus can be recognized.

Elmer

Elmer, the eldest of the three brothers, develops a style that is particularly well attuned to the landscape.  Thus, in an early illustration of a boat Elmer shows care in depicting the boat accurately, though the horizon line is wrong and his figures are awkward. In later books Elmer continues to pose rather awkward figures in a landscape that is quite delicately depicted.

This painting was done on the verso of a flyer for Ayer's pills

We can identify Arthur’s watercolor style in a number of illustrations in the collection of the boy’s books.  The house on the cover of Littles Catalogue of Trees and Shrubs 1893 and the trompe l’oeil advertisement for a “Pinecliff Hedge” uses the same yellow and orange gouache employed on the flower in the signed drawing.

The same careful employment of gouache can be seen on the bird-eye “Partial view of the Nelson Bros Seed Farm” on the cover of Nelson Bros Novelties and in the “Our Greatest 25 Cent Collection of Vegetables,” with its elaborate banner.

As “the worlds historian” for the three brothers’ imaginary landscape, Arthur was the main writer and illustrator of many of their books, often using thinly-disguised pseudonyms, most frequently the Long Continent hero, “Walter J. Little.”  In Arthur’s early work, such as Adventure on the Scud (by AW Nelson) and An Adventure on Red Rover (by Arthur Little), Elmer’s influence can be seen in the attention given to the boat and in the awkwardness of the figures.

Although Arthur Little is described in An Adventure on Red Rover as “a common size boy of fourteen years not so large as Otho [Strong] but more muscular than he,” and fellow coal miner Walter Allen is said to be “about twelve years of age.” It would appear, however, judging by the style of his work, that Arthur Nelson wrote this adventure story when he was younger than 14, using book-making to inflate his age as well as his muscles.

One of the recurrent themes in Arthur’s illustrations is the military portrait.  We can see a progression from the earliest, awkward profile drawings found in Eathan F. Allen and his Family and in the Complete History of Big Continent, to the more refined portraits of William J. Little and Bert S. Green that were pasted into the History of Long Continent by “AW Nelson”—a book that, judging from the primitiveness of the other illustrations, was apparently originally made by a much younger Arthur.

While the pasted-in portraits of William J. Little and Bert S. Green have skillfully rendered facial features, the awkwardness of their scribbled, pointy beards suggest that Arthur drew these before he himself had first-hand experience with whiskers.

Among Arthur’s most successful portraits are a pair adorning the inside cover of the February, 1893 edition of “Chit-Chat.”  The raised eyebrows of E.F.A. looking across to a properly-bearded W. J. L makes for a charming scene.

Just as with Popies Cruse, there appears to be two different hands at work in the thirty-two figures illustrating Military Uniforms.  The first nine are crudely drawn, while the remainder are much more carefully posed.  The coloring technique of these latter, more successful, drawings matches what we have already identified as Arthur’s hand.

The inspiration for the elaborate collection of uniforms the Nelson brothers depicted is undoubtedly illustrations that they saw in such popular publications as Youth Companion.  We should note, however, that the boys were not merely copying what they saw in print; they were, rather, incorporating these models into their own imaginary world.

All of the Nelson brothers show signs of having received instruction in technical drawing, as we can see with the fifteen-year-old Arthur’s fanciful “The Great BC Telescope”  in the January 1895 issue of War News or in his carefully rendered “The New Derry Harrow” which appears in the April 1894 issue of The Intellectual Farmer. Arthur’s technical skill with pen and ink can also be seen in the careful depictions of agricultural produce, such as “The Lady Nell Strawberry” and the “New Everbearing Cucumber.”

Suspension bridge spread in the Complete History of Big Continent

and a similar bridge drawn years later for the Gazetter of the World

The Complete History of Big Continent—whose crude portraits of George Allen and Ethan F. Allen identify the book’s illustrator as a young Arthur—has an unusual two-page illustration of the bridge over Great River on Big Continent, which is described as: “so long that any one could not see more than half the length of the bridge it was the largest in the world the Big Continent people were very proud of it it was five hundred and fifty miles long.”   Arthur’s drawing looks like it might have been inspired by an engraving of the Brooklyn Bridge.  The motif of a suspension bridge with boats reappears in the Gazetter of the World, whose skillfully drawn illustrations place it as one of the last books produced by the Nelson brothers.

On the title page of Gazetter of the World are scenes of an elaborately detailed three-masted schooner emerging from icebergs and of a fleet of ships sailing around an atoll.    Here we can observe a sure hand that was comfortable with depicting sailing vessels—something that Arthurs clearly demonstrates with his little vignette of tossing sailboats that appears in “Rough-it Club.”

Impressive technical drawing and scenic vision of the single sheet "Twelve Scenes"

By far the most impressive artistic work in the collection of the Nelson Family Juvenilia is “Twelve Scenes”—twelve ink landscapes drawn on a loose sheet of paper.  A double line divides the center of the paper, and four pairs of horizontal scenes are placed above a row of four vertical scenes.  Comparing these scenes of bridges, sailboats, trains, rivers, lakes, and mountains to what is found in Arthur’s earlier book illustrations suggests that “Twelve Scenes” is the work of a more mature Arthur, drawn after he and Elmer had graduated from making picture books to photography.

The way that the “Twelve Scenes” sheet was prepared to receive the horizontal and vertical drawings is analogous to how the Nelson brothers left blank spaces in their book narratives, into which they would later add illustrations.  The ink landscapes on the unfolded sheet, however, were not made to illustrate a narrative, and they appear not to have been drawn en plein air.   As with the military uniforms, ships, and buildings depicted in the Nelson brothers’ books, it is quite likely that the inspiration for at least some of these twelve scenes came from printed material.  Nonetheless, given the fact that we had already seen Arthur expropriate adult publications in the books he illustrated when he was thirteen- to fifteen-years old, it seems reasonable to assume that these twelve ink drawings depict landscapes imagined by an Arthur in his late teens.