Lady Liberty

We're right in between the 2016 Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention, and things feel a bit divided. Maybe some images of Lady Liberty will help keep our spirits up?

     Paul Stahr's World War I "Be Patriotic" is gouache on paper and invokes that "Come on, we're in this together!" feeling. Stahr was a well-known illustrator who apparently did everything from government advertisements to pulp covers to magazine covers. Below is a cover from The Elks Magazine in 1928. The content doesn't really have anything to do with the cover...

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Liberty Bound
​or Liberty Bond?
U Can Change it!

     This World War I image is ink pen over pencil, and signed by James Hart. He doesn't seem to have been a prolific artist (he's not the landscape painter James D. Hart), at least in terms of actually signing illustrations. He could have had lots of drawings in magazine that were just never credited... Printers and illustrators were encouraged to help the war effort by printing propaganda images like this one. 

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"Mrs. Carolyn Foster Stickney, full-length portrait, standing, facing right, dressed as Lady Liberty for the Jekyll Island Club costume ball, January 16, 1911"

     After her first husband's death in 1903, it might have been nice outfits like the Lady Liberty costume that landed Mrs. Carolyn Foster Stickney a French prince as a husband around 1913. You can read a bit more about her first husband's hotel and her eccentricities here. 

From the Library of Congress.

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     Capitalizing on the buzz of the in-construction, soon-to-be-opened Statue of Liberty, this theatrical poster from the Library of Congress advertises Madame Girard Gyer as "this Lady," Lady Liberty. 

Harrisburg Daily Independent Newspaper Clipping

     Gyer and her husband had a theatrical troupe aptly named Madame Girard Gyer's English Novelty Company and Star Troupe of Roman and Heathen Statuary that traveled around the country from at least the early 1880s to the early 1890s. ​ She did gain some infamy with this poster and has become a some-what iconic image of Lady Liberty.

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And just so we remember the political mess that is 2016, I'll leave you with this: 

     A gorilla carrying a rock that says "Republicanism" in one arm, Lady Liberty in the other, standing on a rock that says Trusts, with a democracy arrow in his chest. (The gorilla looks a lot like King Kong, but it's actually based on a famous statue by Emmanuel Frémiet from 1887). "Trusts are the problem" -- while referring to actual trusts, like monopolies and other business actions that limit competition, there is just something about it that resonates with this year's election...