Ike Morgan

I was recently contacted by Ike Morgan's great nephew, who is working on gathering information on his great uncle. Unfortunately, I didn't have much to add to his knowledge - but he kindly allowed me to post this image of a lovely portrait in his possession (on the left) of Ike Morgan's sister - his grandmother.

In looking about, there doesn't seem to be much information readily available about Morgan. My posting from earlier this year has a few tidbits (click here).  He started as a newspaper artist - just like W.W. Denslow and John R. Neill. Unfortunately, newspaper art is very ephemeral and tends to be forgotten over the years, making it more difficult to investigate.

I did find that he illustrated a couple short stories published in 1907 in the Los Angeles Herald - the image on the right is from one, titled Mr Blink's Automobile. Two of these can be found online at Chronicling America, a site featuring scans of newspapers from 1826 - 1922.

Morgan illustrated a number of books - for L. Frank Baum, he contributed illustrations to American Fairy Tales, as well as illustrating The Wogglebug Book. He illustrated the Kids of Many Colors series for Grace Duffie Boylan, which received quite a bit of favorable coverage. A number of reviews for the book can be found in the newspaper archives mentioned above.

One piece I ran across is the painting on the left, which was sold by Buchard Galleries in 2004. It's a charming image and makes me wonder if Morgan did many paintings.



And, he designed the cover for the 1902 Montgomery Ward catalog. Advertising for this specifically calls out Morgan as a well known artist!