Life Drawing 43: The Gluyas Williams Reader

January 6, 1921

Obviously he could draw, but Gluyas Williams also wrote well, and funny. In the early 1920s he seems to have spent nearly as much time at the typewriter as he did at the drawing board. He introduced the blowhard Senator Sounder in the May 27, 1920 issue of Life, a feature (and the subject of a future post) that would become increasingly text-heavy over the next few years. Williams also wrote humorous articles lampooning a variety of contemporary topics that were, best yet, illustrated by the author.

February 24, 1921


August 18, 1921



November 3, 1921



January 26, 1922



May 25, 1922

July 27, 1922
Drawings created solely as illustrations for Life's text pieces were extremely rare. The wall between the art in the magazine and the writing was breached only slightly more often during the '20s. Below is one of those occasions, with Williams illustrating a story by Alan Patrick Herbert.

August 10, 1922



September 28, 1922


Happily, while all this writing was going on Williams did not completely abandon the sequential strips or the full-page drawings showcasing the amazing play with perspective, crowd control and deftly spotted blacks that he was known for.

August 17, 1922



September 14, 1922


October 5, 1922

Turns out there actually was a game played in London that involved spotting men with beards and shouting, "Beaver!" Williams seems to have been right on top of things with this drawing, as most citations date the origin of the game at 1922. He may have been the first, but he wasn't the only Life artist to do a beaver cartoon. It's worth mentioning that this game is likely the source of beaver's more contemporary usage, which first appeared in England in 1927.


October 12, 1922

November 23, 1922


Devember 7, 1922


December 21, 1922

Life Drawing Sunday 29: Christmas

F. G. Cooper, December 3, 1925

Charles J. Budd, December 17, 1908


Ralph Barton, December 3, 1925




Frederick Strothmann, December 3, 1925



Albert D. Blashfield, December 4, 1897



Rea Irvin, December 12, 1923




Tousey, December 14, 1922





Gluyas Williams, December 3, 1925



Art Young, December 16, 1897



Power O'Malley, December 17, 1908



Webster, December 23, 1920


Paul Goold, December 12, 1920



John Held, Jr., December 3, 1925

R. Culter, December 3, 1925



C. F. Peters, December 3, 1925


Rube Goldberg, December 3, 1925



Gardner Rea, December 23, 1920



J. R. Shaver, December 21, 1922



Edward Monks, December 14, 1922


Percy Crosby, December 02, 1926



J. M. Flagg, December 19, 1907



Charles Dana Gibson, December 23, 1897




F. G. Attwood, December 8, 1887

Life Drawing Sunday 21: Gluyas Williams

The Harvard Lampoon, May 15, 1909.

Gluyas Williams sold his first drawing to Life in 1911. He said,"They accepted the first one, and then waited about eight years before taking another." Maybe not so coincidentally, his appearances in Life increased noticibly around the time that Robert Benchley became an editor at the magazine in 1920. Benchley and Williams first met, and collaborated, at The Harvard Lampoon. It was a perfect marriage of writer and illustrator that would continue for decades. Williams illustrated all of Benchley's books and many of his stories. Benchley began to see himself in all of Williams' work. "There is only one drawback in having been Mr. Williams’s model for so many pictures. After years of capturing those particular facial characteristics of which my mother is so fond, he has quite unconsciously taken to putting me into all his drawings, commercial and otherwise, as the typical American Sap."

Life house ad, July 22, 1920

Williams attributed his early interest in becoming an artist to watching his older sister Mary at work. Using the pseudomym Kate Carew, she was "the first female caricaturist", known for her illustrated interviews with celebrities of the day such as Mark Twain and the Wright brothers. She also created the comic strip The Angel Child, which may also have given Gluyas an appreciation for sequential cartooning.

This post features Williams' earliest work for Life and are mostly representative of his take on the comic strip format. He would later create series that were primarily text pieces (such as his Senator Sounder character,) as well as pages depicting situations wordlessly and so well posed out that they practically animated. He also produced some astonishing full page single panel cartoons for Life and later for The New Yorker.

Richard Marschall wrote in The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons:

Seldom in the history of cartooning has there been an artist as much in command of his media as was Gluyas Williams. Technically his pen line was confident, attractive and reproducible, his figures comical but anatomically perfect, his use of perspective unerring. Conceptually his characters were strong, his choice of themes humorous, ironic and critically mature, his moods evocative and familiar. Williams seldom used tones but spotted blacks in seas of white and supple lines.

And he made it look so easy.





February 13, 1919

October 16, 1919


May 20, 1920


May 27, 1920


June 3, 1920


July 8, 1920


June 17, 1920


July 29, 1920


October 12, 1920