Two Decades of Illustration: Highlights from the Collection

For 21 years, The Brinton Museum has hosted an annual show that features the best in illustration art nationally and internationally. The American West has been a predominant theme in many of these illustrations. In the most basic sense, illustration art accompanies a publication by visualizing for the reader a specific passage in the text.  It encapsulates a narrative through image. The works from The Brinton Museum’s permanent collection on display in this gallery reveal the breadth of illustration art created in the past two decades. 

For the 2012 exhibition The Dickens of the Bradford Brinton Memorial & Museum Bridger Konkel created the lovely Cottontail. Zak Pullen, whose work is featured in this year’s Illustrator Show, is here represented with a work from his 2014 exhibition The Art of Visual Storytelling: Original Illustrations by Zachary Pullen. Vic Juhasz holds the distinction of being the first featured illustrator in the Forrest E. Mars, Jr. Building in 2016. The Brinton acquired several of his drawings, including illustrations for the children’s book on President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

There are many other great examples of illustration art in the collection. Gennady Spirin is a renown Russian-born illustrator of children’s books but also classic authors such as William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy. Illustrations by James R. Williams, Henry Ziegler, and William Gollings offer an opportunity to reflect on the history of the American West in illustration. Consider, for example, that many of the classic Western artists represented in our Western Art Gallery were illustrators, such as Frederic Remington, W. H. Koerner, William Gollings, and Frank Tenney Johnson. We invite you to compare the works in this gallery along with the paintings on our second floor gallery. How has the approach to the art of illustration changed over time? How have individual artistic styles shaped the evolution of illustration art?