page_title: Clara Elsene Peck
section_title: Illustration
hierarchical_section_title: Clara Elsene Peck / Career / Illustration
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover to Theatre Magazine Featured in Clara_Elsene_Peck
context_page_description: Clara Elsene Peck was an American illustrator and painter known for her illustrations of women and children in the early 20th century. Peck received her arts education from the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts and was employed as a magazine illustrator from 1906 to 1940. Peck's body of work encompasses a wide range, from popular women's magazines and children's books, works of fiction, commercial art for products like Ivory soap, and comic books and watercolor painting later in her career. Peck worked during the "Golden Age of American Illustration" contemporaneous with noted female illustrators Jessie Willcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green and Violet Oakley.
  Peck's work appeared in exhibitions from the Art Institute of Chicago to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and she received awards from the New York Association of Women Painters and Sculptors in the 1920s. Peck resided in an art colony in Leonia, New Jersey with her collaborator and husband, artist John Scott Williams. In the 1940s, Peck contributed to Catholic comic books distributed to parochial schools. She focused on watercolor painting in the 1950s and her work was exhibited in Europe and the United States.
context_section_description: Peck's career in illustration began in the early 1900s with her work for publisher George W. Jacobs in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This was a period when technological innovations in halftone and color printing engendered the "Golden Age of Illustration". In addition to illustrations, Peck created decorations and lettering designs for books.  Notable works from this period include illustrations for Sara Hawks Sterling's Shakespeare's Sweetheart (1905) and A Lady of King Arthur's Court (1907), and Josephine Daskam Bacon's In the Border Country (1909). Peck eventually illustrated at least four additional books by Bacon.
  By 1908, Peck had designed her first cover for Collier's. Peck began illustrating women's magazines during the 1910s and 1920s, contributing to Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Today's Housewife, and Household Magazine.  Peck's magazine illustrations appeared in St. Nicholas Magazine, The Century Magazine, The Delineator, the Pictorial Review, and The Youth's Companion.  She contributed several cover illustrations to Theatre Magazine in the early 1920s and worked as a commercial artist on advertising campaigns for companies such as Procter & Gamble, Metropolitan Life, the Aeolian Company, and Ivory Soap.  Peck also illustrated educational books, educational certificates, sheet music, fiction, and fairy tales.
  Women and children in Peck's work were depicted with great sensitivity in a wide variety of roles and responsibilities.  Art historian and illustrator Walt Reed describes Peck's style as "decorative in composition and sensitive in rendering". Artistic themes found in Peck's work include education, child psychology, and the expectant mother. The decorative style of the period was popularized by seminal American illustrator Howard Pyle and his female students.  According to Elizabeth H. Hawkes, curator emeritus of the Delaware Art Museum, the style consisted of "using flat, brightly colored figures boldly outlined and placed against a patterned background.  They incorporated elements of the popular 1890s poster style and borrowed motifs from Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, and the English Arts and Crafts movement style of illustration."
  Peck's career in illustration was active from the "Golden Age of American Illustration" through the onset of the Great Depression when the careers of illustrators suffered due to the poor economy.  The output of magazine illustrations from Peck continued until at least 1935.
caption: Cover for Theatre Magazine, November 1921
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