More on Thomas Nast

In my earlier post about making my own hand sketched Christmas Cards, I mentioned how much I like the work of Thomas Nast – the man often credited with creating our popular image of Father Christmas as the jolly, bearded man in long red robes, beloved of children. I thought I’d write a little more about him. 

Reading about his life, I was struck by the thought that you could probably make a great film or miniseries about it. Nast was possibly the most important and influential cartoonist in American history. He was a man who could legitimately claim to have ‘made’ presidents through his championing of their causes, and to have pretty much singlehandedly brought down the notoriously corrupt New York city administration of William “Boss” Tweed and his Tammany Hall associates. His cartoons helped ensure the re-election of Abraham Lincoln in 1864, when his Democrat opponent, George B. McLellan, looked likely to try to negotiate an end to the Civil War with the southern states. Even Ulysses S. Grant attributed his successful bid for the presidency in 1868 to Nast’s support.

My copy of another Thomas Nast Santa.

Apparently when he put Santa in a domestic setting like this one,

he often replicated details of his own home,

and when Santa is shown with children,

they are often based on Nast's own children.

I like the work. Nast’s cartoons and illustrations have all of the intricacy that you’d expect of the period, with liberal use of hatching and cross hatching to create shade and darkness. But I do like his sense of humour as well, from the biting satire of his crusade against Tweed, to the gentle humour of some of his Christmas work, like the cartoon of the little boy crying outside a shop in the window of which there is a notice saying ‘Christmas Comes But Once A Year’.

To me, Nast's Santa often has just a touch of the

twinkly old rogue about him, like this one showing

him having a crafty break for a smoke on a rooftop

I also feel that I like the man, to a certain degree. Nast was a champion of the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was very much an anti-slavery abolitionist, and used his drawing pen to condemn the activities of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. In his time he championed the plight of Native Americans and Chinese immigrants. Nast was once approached by associates of Tweed and offered an astronomical bribe to stop his campaign, which, to his credit, he refused to accept. All this is positive. Having said this, on the other side of the ledger it appears that he was anti-Catholic, and certainly his portrayal of Irish people as violent drunken thugs was cruel, unfair, and inexcusable. The fact is that at times in his career, for all of his opposition to slavery and his support of the plight of Chinese immigrants he still at times resorted to lazy and unflatteringly stereotyped images of black people and Chinese people.

I don't think Santa ever appeared quite as sinister to me as

he does in this copy of a Nast original. There's a touch of the 

seedy old goblin about him here. 

Sadly the later part of Nast’s life was not so successful as the earlier. In 1886 he left Harper’s Weekly. After Fletcher Harper died, the new editor did not see eye to eye with Nast, and tension had simmered between them for some time. Two years earlier he had lost much of his wealth through being swindled by a fraudulent banking and brokerage firm. New publishing ventures failed. As Teddy Roosevelt became president in the early years of the new century, Nast applied for work with the US State Department, hoping for a diplomatic position in Europe. Roosevelt offered him to become Consul General in Ecuador, where he succumbed to yellow fever and died towards the end of 1902. 

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I don't think that this next one was original made by Nast - well, I'm sure it wasn't, but it's another 19th century depiction of Santa which I found on google, and I really like