Howard Chandler Christy: The Most Famous Painter of the Jazz Age

by Exhibiting Author James Philip Head

In the late fall of 1988, as a freshman economics major at the University of Maryland in College Park, I found myself studying one night in the upper stacks of the campus’s Hornbake Library. Bored, I glanced upward to the ceiling and, out of the corner of my eye, spotted a gilded-leaf folio on the library’s shelf titled The Social Ladder by Charles Dana Gibson. I pulled the book down and studied its pages, each filled with the most exquisite pen-and-ink drawings I had ever seen. To me, this was beauty. A bygone era of gentlemen and ladies, elegantly dressed, were portrayed in scenes of the Gilded Age—ornate opera boxes and drawing rooms, lavish cotillions and horse-drawn carriages. With the assistance of the library’s copying machine, I reproduced each of those pages and went back the next night for another folio. I did the same the following evening, and again the next until I had exhausted the library’s Gibson collection with a sizable stack of illustrations I could further savor and study.

For years, I had read about Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and Chagall. But what about Charles Dana Gibson? Gibson had exquisite talent. With pen and ink, he could turn paper into flesh. I studied these works and learned that Gibson was the foremost illustrator in America during the 1890s and highly celebrated. He created the Gibson Girl, perhaps the most famous woman of the late Victorian era who never existed.

But somehow over time, Gibson and his work had been virtually forgotten, perishing into the swirling mists of time.

Three years later, on a September afternoon, while perusing a Borders bookstore in my hometown of Rockville, Maryland, I inadvertently stumbled across Susan Meyer’s reprinting of her 1978 book titled America’s Greatest Illustrators. From the glossy cover, I recognized the Gibson Girl and bought a copy.

Laying on my childhood bed, I read each of the life stories of those ten great American illustrators, including that of Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg (who gave us a finger pointing Uncle Sam), and the legendary Norman Rockwell. All of them had me spellbound. Yet the short summary of the life of a once-blind illustrator turned portrait painter fascinated me the most. For here was a man who rose from rags to riches, transcending the field of illustration to become a world-famous portraitist and celebrity. It was a true American story. The US Capitol and White House owned his works—not just one but many—mere miles from where I lived. Significantly, I recognized his famous “Christy Girl” images and his World War I posters, but knew nothing about the artist. His name was Howard Chandler Christy, and I soon discovered he had captured on canvas some of the most prominent people of the first half of the twentieth century including U.S. presidents, congressmen, great industrialists, Hollywood movie stars, and living legends. With his brush, Christy rose to become the most famous painter of the Jazz Age. Indeed, in 1938, Time magazine proclaimed him to be “the most commercially successful U.S. artist.”

Inspired and intrigued, I vowed to write a full biography on Christy, not just a boring, academic treatise but one that would spring to life for the reader, truthfully telling his story and that of his second wife, Nancy, a former Cosmopolitan model who was once considered one of the most beautiful women in American in the 1910s, ‘20s and ‘30s. More than ten years of research culminated in my epic biographical trilogy titled An Affair with Beauty – The Mystique of Howard Chandler Christy. The Magic of Youth, the first book in the series, was recently published, and the subsequent two are due for publication in 2018 and 2020.

The Christy story is not a story about an artist and his art. It’s about the changing of America during the first half of the twentieth century and a man who inspired it and captured it. Christy had fame, fortune, and beautiful models, but in the end he discovered something much greater . . . .

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Captivated by the talent, fame and subsequent obscurity of Howard Chandler Christy, Jim Head interviewed Christy’s former models, family members and others who knew him, and ultimately engaged research assistants around the country to help him uncover the true, untold story of his Christy and his wife, Nancy. Head is a law partner with Williams Mullen, P.C. in Tysons Corner, Virginia, where he concentrates on estate planning and trust and estate litigation. Visit him at the Gaithersburg Book Festival or online at www.anaffairwithbeauty.com.