The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 76

Arthur Burdett Frost
American, 1851–1928
Born in Philadelphia, Arthur Burdett Frost was a prolific illus-
trator known for his comedic sketches and sporting scenes of
hunters and fishermen. He learned engraving and lithography
as a teenager, and by 1874 he made his big breakthrough when
he was asked to create hundreds of humorous illustrations for
the publication Out of the Hurly-Burly, or Life in an Odd Corner;
it sold more than a million copies. A year later he was hired by
The Daily Graphic in New York, and in 1876, Frost joined the
art department at Harper’s. There, he worked alongside Howard
Pyle and Frederic Remington as well as with Tile Club members
Edwin Austin Abbey and Charles Stanley Reinhart. A study trip
to London in 1877 gave Frost the opportunity to work at Judy, or
The London Serio-Comic Journal as well as to meet and work for
Lewis Carroll. Knowledge of English photographer Eadweard
Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion (1878) and his use of successive
images also was influential on Frost’s career, especially his creation
of sequential cartoon drawings.
From 1878 to 1881, Frost was a student of Thomas Eakins at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). He also studied
with Gilbert Tucker Margeson in Massachusetts and with William
Merritt Chase at the Shinnecock Hills School of the Arts in New
York. In 1883, Frost married fellow illustrator Emily Louise Phil-
lips, whom he had met at PAFA, and in 1906, the family moved to
France, finally settling in Giverny in the spring of 1907. At the start
of World War I, however, they returned to the Unites States, first
to a suburb of Philadelphia and then to California in 1920. Frost
died in Pasadena in 1928. A quote from Francis Hopkinson Smith
gives us a glimpse into Frost’s character and career: “…in trying to
explain psychologically why we laugh at Mr. Frost’s caricatures, [he]
says that ‘no man laughs effectively with pen or brush who does not
laugh with his own soul first…’” (Bridges, 56).
70 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting
Thomas Eakins (American, 1844–1916), Portrait of Arthur
Burdett Frost, ca. 1886, oil on canvas, 27 1/16 x 21 15/16 in.,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Thomas Eakins and
Miss Mary Adeline Williams, 1929, 1929-184-1
REFERENCES:
Bridges, Robert. “A. B. Frost.” The Book Buyer (1867-1903) 11,
no. 2 (March 1, 1894): 56.
Reed, Henry M. The A. B. Frost Book. Charleston, SC: Wyrick
& Co., 1993.
Smolderen, Thierry. The Origins of Comics: From William Hog-
arth to Winsor McCay. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick
Nguyen. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.
Wallace, Irwin and Joel Chandler Harris. A Book of Drawings by
A. B. Frost. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1904.