Leo Hershfield

Leo Hershfield (1904 – 1979) was a prominent American illustrator and a courtroom artist for NBC News. NBC referred to him as the "Dean of Courtroom Artists" since he was the first modern artist to sketch for TV news in 1950's and covered 147 trials for NBC until when he died in the late 1970s.

Biography

Hershfield was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the child of immigrants Isadore Abraham Hershfield and Ida Alshanetsky from Kiev, Ukraine. After growing up in Chattanooga, TN, he moved to New York in the 1920s, where he studied at the National Academy of Design and joined the Art Students League. He supported himself as an employee in the "morgue", or clippings library of the New York World. In 1923, he worked his way to Europe twice on a freighter to expand his drawing and watercolor style. In the 1930s, he worked simultaneously on the staff of the Chattanooga Times and later began writing articles and drawing for the political and theater pages of The New York Times.

In 1940, he worked for the controversial PM then moved to Alexandria, VA to join the Office of War Information with his new wife, former model and Roxyette Mary Emma Hurst of New Bern, North Carolina. When the war ended he became a freelancer, illustrating for publications such as Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post and Kiplinger's Changing Times. During the 1950s and early 1960s he also created vivid political cartoons as cover art for the Democratic Digest, the publication of the Democratic National Committee. Hershfield illustrated the covers and interiors of more than 55 books, including those by Richard Armour, Vincent Price, H. Allen Smith and Groucho Marx. Hershfield worked in many media including pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, block printing, wood carving, metal sculpture and photography. He designed and built children's toys as well wrote and illustrated a children's book.

Courtroom illustration

In 1954, Hershfield's sketches accompanied NBC News' coverage of the Army-McCarthy Censure Hearings. Thereafter, he drew the proceedings for NBC at major trials around the country, including the Chicago Seven, the Harrisburg Seven, Jack Ruby, James Earl Ray, Clay Shaw, Arthur Bremer, Benjamin Spock, the Gainesville Eight, Billie Sol Estes and most famously the court martial of Lt. William Calley convicted in the My Lai Massacre trial. For 25 years, Hershfield's trial watercolors were presented by news reporters like John Cameron Swayze, David Brinkley and John Chancellor.

The age of courtroom art in the U.S. came to a close in the late 1970s, when the Florida Supreme Court ruled that cameras could be allowed back into the courtroom. After moving to Bradenton, FL in 1958, Hershfield continued to illustrate books and articles for the St. Petersburg Times and Sarasota Herald Tribune, spending his spare time sailing the Manatee River and documenting Florida through watercolors. He was an ardent environmentalist, illustrating articles in newspapers and magazines in an attempt to save Florida's wetlands from industrial development.

WEDU, the local Florida PBS affiliate, interviewed Hershfield and aired a documentary about his career shortly before his death in 1979. In 1980, Washington's Corcoran Gallery held a retrospective exhibition of Hershfield's quarter century of courtroom illustration.

References

"Leo Hershfield, 75, Illustrator of Trials For Television News," New York Times, April 19, 1979.

External links

• Hershfield illustration in Memoirs of a Mangy Lover, Groucho Marx.
• Hershfield illustration in Low and Inside: A Book of Baseball Anecdotes, Oddities, and Curiosities, H. Allen Smith.
• Original artwork by Leo Hershfield in archives of the Democratic Digest, Rubenstein Library, Duke University.