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Picturing a World

Mary Hamilton Frye

Lisbeth Zwerger is one of my favorite living illustrators, and I couldn’t resist pairing a sample of her work with a picture from the Golden Age by Mary Hamilton Frye (1890–1951). Is it just my imagination, or do they share a sensibility? For Zwerger’s illustration of Hans Chrisian Andersen’s Swineherd, click here. For a high rez version of Frye’s Nils, click here.

Frye has fallen into obscurity, yet from what I can learn about her, she must have led an artistically satisfying life, working in the Arts and Crafts world of early 20th C Boston. Born in Salem, Mass., she studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts; worked with Charles Connick in stained glass; had her own glass studio in Cambridge; studied painting with Maxfield Parrish in Cornish, N.H.; was a member of Boston’s Copley Society of Artists; and illustrated books and magazine stories. She died in Concord, Massachusetts.

To read the Wonderful Adventures of Nils with Frye’s illustrations, click here.

Her silhouettes also illustrate an article, “Children and the Theatre” by Margaret Melbourne in Home Progress, vol. 3, no. 2 (October 1913), pp. 68-70, available on line via Google Books.

For illustrations by Zwerger, click here.
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