first issue and he received his euphonious name during the magazine's first year. It was
the magazine's first art editor, who illustrated that cover. Until fairly recently it has been reproduced more or less annually on the anniversary issue. Eustace Tilley also appears on the magazine's masthead every week and he makes occasional appearances in other illustrations as needed.
Harold Ross founded the magazine with Raoul Fleischmann and served as its editor. It was probably only a matter of time before someone portrayed him as Eustace Tilley. A period photo of the young Harold Ross shows his remarkable shock of hair brushed skyward.
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Harold Ross, 1926. The photo is apparently reversed.
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Harold Ross as Eustace Tilley? The idea is straightforward enough. It isn't such a great stretch for an illustrator to depict the
New Yorker's founding editor Harold Ross as the foppish Eustace Tilley. The first to do this was Irvin himself. The occasion was a parody issue of the magazine dated November 6, 1926, Ross's birthday. It was circulated in-house at the
New Yorker as a gift for Ross.
Rea Irvin, under the joking pseudonym Penaninksky, depicts Ross in profile, adopting Eustace Tilley's characteristic perceptive pose. Ross is shown in silhouette because this one-off had to be printed cheaply in black-and-white. The top hat may be Tilley's but the spiky hair clearly belongs to Ross only. Ross was a chain-smoker and thus a cigarette dangles from his lip. He still wears Tilley's nineteenth century waistcoat but his snazzy shirt and tie belong to the Jazz Age. The delicate butterfly of the classic magazine cover is replaced by the not-so-delicate form of
Alexander Woollcott as a fedora-clad spider.
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Rea Irvin, The New Yorker in-house parody, November 6, 1926
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A photograph shows the dapper Alexander Woollcott's fondness for hats. He doesn't look at all like a spider, does he?
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Alexander Woollcott
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Margaret Case Harriman's The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table was published in 1951, a quarter-century later. When illustrator
Al Hirschfeld chose to depict the Round Table's Harold Ross in the guise of Eustace Tilley, he was very likely unaware of Rea Irvin's earlier illustration, which had been circulated only within the
New Yorker's offices. Ross of course was older now: his head was rounder, he wore glasses, and his once gravity-defying hair was slicked down.
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Harold Ross
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Hirschfeld depicts Ross with a wheat straw in his mouth, something of an out-of-town rube in high society finery. He is not the first to note Ross's relatively unsophisticated manners which stand in marked contrast to his high social standing at the classy magazine.
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| Al Hirschfeld "+ R. I.," Harold Ross from The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table, 1951 |
The book's dustcover reproduces Hirschfeld's caricatures of (left to right, top to bottom) Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley, Harold Ross, Robert Sherwood, Irving Berlin, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott.
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Al Hirschfeld, The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table, 1951 by Margaret Case Harriman
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More recently, Thomas Kunkel's biography of Harold Ross uses Rea Irvin's caricature of Ross as Tilley on its cover.
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| Rea Irvin, Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker, 1995, by Thomas Kunkel |
April 5, 2016 Update: A detail of Edward Sorel's mural at Monkey Bar in New York shows Harold Ross in the guise of Eustace Tilley.
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Harold Ross as Eustace Tilley
Detail from Edward Sorel's Monkey Bar mural completed in 2009
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September 5, 2016 Update: The original artwork by Al Hirschfeld was sold at Swann Galleries in 2008.
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| Al Hirschfeld "+ R. I.," Original art, Harold Ross from The Vicious Circle: The Story of the Algonquin Round Table, 1951 |
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Swann Galleries, June 12, 2008, Hammer Price
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Note: Artwork from The Vicious Circle is © The Al Hirschfeld Foundation. My thanks to
Stephen Kroninger for permission to use his scans of the book
. On Tuesday he will participate in a panel discussion entitled
"The Hirschfeld Century Speaks" at the Art Students League in Manhattan. Joining him will be
Ken Fallin, Drew Friedman, and
Bill Jacklin, while
David Leopold, the Creative Director of the Al Hirschfeld Foundation, will be moderating. I'll be there in the audience if I can get out of work early enough, which is another way of saying I probably won't be there. Say hi to me anyway.
Have you seen
"The Hirschfeld Century" at the New-York Historical Society? It's a stunning show, but it's only there through October 12. Don't miss it.
The scan of the
New Yorker's rare parody issue is taken from
Magazine History: A Collector's Blog by
Steven Lomazow, M.D. He's that rarity: a doctor interested in scarce printed memorabilia! Who ever heard of such a thing?
Follow the links to more
Attempted Bloggery posts about
Harold Ross, Alexander Woollcott, Eustace Tilley, Rea Irvin, and
Al Hirschfeld.
You might also care to look at
Michael Maslin's Ink Spill post on
Ross & Tilley.
See how Hirschfeld altered a
photo of Harold Ross in
Life magazine and got himself banned from the
New Yorker for almost six decades. (Thanks again to Stephen Kroninger!)
Please contact me if you have other images of
Harold Ross as Eustace Tilley. In particular, I believe there's a 1980's-era
photographic illustration by
Ellen Page Wilson along these lines.
I'd also love to hear from anyone with interior scans or photos of the
New Yorker's rare self-parody issue.
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Cuphead and Mugman gambled with the Devil...
