Nell Brinkley

Golden Eyes with Uncle Sam (dog), by Nell Brinkley, ca. 1918.

Nell Brinkley (September 5, 1886 – October 21, 1944) was an illustrator and comic artist who was often referred to as the "Queen of Comics" during her nearly four decade career working with New York magazines. She was the creator of the iconic "Brinkley Girl", a stylish woman who appeared in her comics and became a popular symbol written about in songs and portrayed in films and theatre.

Background and career

Nell Brinkley was born in Denver, Colorado in 1886, some say 1888, but her family soon moved to the small "wild west" town of Edgewater, Colorado on Denver's western border facing Sloan's Lake at Manhattan Beach. She was not formally trained in the arts, and in fact dropped out of high school to follow her natural talent with pen and ink. As a tot, she drew place-setting illustrations of knobby-kneed kiddies for Mary Elitch's garden parties at Elitch Gardens Amusement Park. At the age of 16, she was already accomplished at illustration. She illustrated the bookcover and 25 charming illustrations for a children's book written by A.U.Mayfield, published in Denver in 1906. It was entitled "Wally Wish and Maggie Magpie". She knocked on doors. Nell was hired to do pen and ink drawings for the Denver Post and later the "Rocky Mountain News", then named the Denver Times.

In 1907, Nell's skills were noticed by media mogul William Randolph Hearst and his most famous editor Arthur Brisbane. Though she was still a teenager, she was convinced to move from Denver to Brooklyn, NY with her mother. She began working in downtown Manhattan with the New York Journal, where she produced, almost daily, large detailed illustrations with commentary, but she refused doing cartoon-strips. Her newspaper's circulation boomed; her artwork was featured in the magazine section.

She had instant fame! Within a year of her arrival in New York, she became well known for those breezy, charming and entertaining creations. The curly-haired everyday working-girl drawings were known as "The Brinkley Girl," which soon upstaged the "Gibson Girl" and was used as the theme of the "1908 Ziegfeld Follies." Bloomingdale department store featured a "Nell Brinkley day" showing ads using many of her drawings. The Denver Press Club greeted her when she vacationed in Colorado in the summer of 1908. Nell was most famous for her representing "relationships between boy and girl - man and woman - Bettys and Billies." Her illustrations used the drawing of "Dan Cupid" to represent the presence of that something most people call "love"!

Nell's reputation was also built by one of her early assignments in New York, to cover the sensational murder trial of Harry K. Thaw. Nell was assigned many interviews with the actress-wife, Evelyn Nesbit. In later years, Nell covered other infamous murder trials. She produced numerous courtroom illustrations printed in the Evening Journal and other Hearst newspapers.

Nell flew with Glen Martin in his new byplane and reported the daring swoopings and the landing for her readers. Nell helped with War Bond drives, and she entertained and consoled those at home and the American youth abroad, during and just after WWI. She traveled to Washington, DC where she interviewed many young ladies who had left their homes to become defense workers.

Nell also became known for the charming text that accompanied her stories and reporting while she worked at the Evening Journal and other publications that included Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Harper's Magazine. She produced many illustrated theatre reviews and profiles of mothers and young women in society, including later, in the 1930's First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Much of her writing promoted the working women of the time, and encouraged the expansion of women's rights.

Nell was syndicated by the King Features Syndicate for distribution of her work in newspapers throughout the USA and in Europe. But in about 1935, photography began to replace pen-and-ink illustrations in newspapers. She had become the most prolific and most famous romantic-writer and illustrator. Subsequently, Nell illustrated some books and produced topical multi-panel pages of art, one of which was collected in an anthology of comics in 1943.

In 1944, when large headlines were about the battles of WWII, Nell Brinkley quietly passed away after over thirty years of entertaining fans from the "most read newspapers," the major media of her time - she was soon to be forgotten. Her mother and father and Nell are buried in a New Rochelle, New York cemetery.

The "Brinkley Girl"

Uncle Sam's Girl Shower, by Nell Brinkley, 1917, an image using her iconic "Brinkley Girl" in support of working women who had arrived in Washington, D.C. only to find they were denied the ability to rent apartments.

Brinkley was known for her idyllic, more independent designs in her artwork. Her female characters, especially, drew attention from readers, and early in her career those characters became well known as the "Brinkley Girl". In comparison to the Gibson Girl stereotype that had been established by Charles Dana Gibson through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which were considered staid and stuffy, the Brinkley Girl was feminine, fun-loving and more independent. One of Brinkley's cartoons that was syndicated nationally, The Three Graces, helped establish this character as an icon. The piece, displaying three women singing the praises of suffrage, preparedness and Americanism with regards to love of country, was one of the first to link young, attractive women with the concept of suffrage. The Brinkley Girl was generally a young working woman who was often seen wearing lacy dresses and wearing her hair in curls, engaged in activities that were more independent than the general female standard. Her work was often considered to have a feminist slant.

The Brinkley Girl became a national sensation, becoming the topic of pop songs, poetry and theatre. The second Ziegfeld Follies, debuting in 1908, featured a number of references to the Brinkley Girl, including a song "The Nell Brinkley Girl" by Harry B. Smith and Maurice Levi.