THE ART OF PAUL BRANSOM

Paul Bransom (1885-1979) was widely known as the Dean of American Animal Artists. His work appeared on the covers of magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and served as illustrations of short stories in periodicals and in books. He provided the illustrations for some 45 books, most notably the 1912 edition of Jack London’s Call of the Wild and the 1913 edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

- Daniel Zimmer

A SELF-TAUGHT ARTIST

Bransom was a self‐taught artist whose formal education ended with the eighth grade of public school in Washington, D.C., where he was born. As a child he watched and drew animals in his backyard, and always hoped to become an artist. He began his professional career at 13 as an apprentice draftsman assisting with mechanical drawings for patents, an exacting discipline requiring precise rendering of structure and details.

Bransom soon moved on to a better‐paying job—at $40 a month—working as a draftsman with the Southern Railway. There he learned to make working drawings of railroad rolling equipment, from steam engines to freight trains.

As a step toward his goal of living in New York City, young Bransom answered an advertisement in a Washington newspaper for a job as draftsman with General Electric Company in Schenectady. To the great dismay of his mother—he was only 16 years old—he was accepted.

Bransom made it to New York City at the age of 17. He obtained a job at The New York Evening Journal carrying on Gus Dirk’s cartoon, “News from Bugsville,” and spent all his spare time at the Zoological Park studying and drawing animals. He was commissioned to make illustrations for a new encyclopedia being published by Dodd, Mead & Co. This was a dream job, because as a young man, he was attracted not to the museums but the National Zoo.