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.
This story is from the Illustration No. 83 edition of Illustration.
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This story is from the Illustration No. 83 edition of Illustration.
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