Thure de Thulstrup

Thure de Thulstrup’s work as illustrator ended so long ago that he seemed himself to belong to another era. To a generation brought up on rotogravures of the Sunday newspaper, those old-time drawings for Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s—reproducing army life in the Civil War, public receptions and public funerals for public men of the Seventies, Presidential inaugurations, “diamond jubilees” and visits of European sovereigns to one another—no doubt seem as crude as operatic selections from the old-time tinkling music-box would seem to the present-day “listener-in” at concerts on the radio. Yet there was something to say for these knights of the pencil who were sent out, half a century ago, to “cover” events along with the newspaper correspondent.

If their pictures lacked the smoothness and meticulous exactness of present-day photographic reproductions, they at least possessed a free-handed execution and emphasis of salient points in group or personality, perhaps at their best a bit of imagination, to which the mechanical pictures of our later period cannot aspire. After all, those were also days when the Pickwicks and Micawbers of the novel-illustrators created mental images never forgotten by the reader; something which no one thinks of suggesting for the “half-tones” of the contemporary published story.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1931 Century Association Yearbook