Dickens's Children

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912 unpaginated with 10 color issustrations. Royal octavo (9 3/4" x 6 3/4") issued in green cloth with decorative color pictorial in gilt lettering on front cover. 1st edition. Jessie Willcox Smith (September 6, 1863 May 3, 1935) was a United States illustrator famous for her work in magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and for her illustrations for children's books. Born in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Smith studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia, graduating in 1888. A year later, she started working in the production department of the Ladies Home Journal, for five years. She left to take classes under Howard Pyle, first at Drexel and then at the Brandywine School. She was a prolific contributor to books and magazines during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, illustrating stories and articles for clients such as Century, Collier's Weekly, Leslie's Weekly, Harper's, McClure's, Scribners, and the Ladies' Home Journal. Smith may be most well known for her covers on Good Housekeeping, which she painted from December 1917 through March 1933. She also painted posters and portraits. Her twelve illustrations for Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies (1916) are also well known. On Smith's death, she bequeathed the original works to the Library of Congress' "Cabinet of American Illustration" collection. (A thirteenth illustration remains in a private collection.) Smith was close friends with the artists Elizabeth Shippen Green and Violet Oakley, who also studied with Pyle. Her papers are deposited in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Condition: Number stamp on back paste down, small nick at head edge, spine ends lightly rubbed else a very good copy lacking jacket. . First Edition. Original Cloth. Very Good/ . Illus. by Smith, Jessie Willcox . Royal octavo.