Cos Cob illustrators.(Current and coming)(Once Upon a Page: Illustrations)

While the history of the American impressionist painters, such as Childe Hassam, Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, and Julian Alden Weir, who spent their summers at the Cos Cob art colony on the shores of Connecticut's Mianus River has become well known in recent years, the story of the talented and prolific book illustrators who also worked there is less so. An exhibition entitled Once Upon a Page: Illustrations by Cos Cob Artists is on view at the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich until January 6, 2008, and features the work of eight artist-illustrators--John Wolcott Adams, George Wharton Edwards, Childe Hassam, Rose Cecil O'Neill, Ernest Thompson Seton, E. Boyd Smith, Jean Webster, and Genjiro Yeto--all of whom had an association with Greenwich and the art colony. Among the more than ninety works on view are illustrated books and original drawings and paintings from both public and private collections.

The years when the Cos Cob art colony flourished, from about 1890 to the 1920s, corresponded with a golden age of book illustration in the United States, which was dominated by such accomplished illustrators as Charles Dana Gibson and Howard Pyle. As advances in commercial printing and photography--notably monochrome and color reproduction processes--gave illustrators a range of options for replicating their original works in print, it also enabled publishers to produce books and periodicals less ...