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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH by Donald Tuttle*

If there is any truth in the Taoist belief that we pass through life leaving a part of ourselves wherever we go, then I "met" Paul Bransom, "Dean of America's Wildlife Artists," two decades before the day we first sat together in his studio. Given a stack of issues of the Saturday Evening Post from the 1930's and 1940's, I remember the day I carefully clipped Bransom's cover and story illustrations of bears, deer and foxhounds and stored them away in my burgeoning picture file. Years later, while living in Canajoharie, N.Y., I suddenly learned that Paul Bransom lived only a few miles north of me at Canada Lake, and that much of his work and certainly many of "my" illustrations had emanated from his studio there.

When we met for the first time in 1977 Paul Bransom was entering his ninety-first year, but what immediately impressed me most was not his artwork or his amazing six-decade career, but his face. In a north light, it is deeply furrowed now, with more seams and creases than an Adirondack back country road. When he talks, it lights up like etched diorite with the memories of sketching expeditions with Texas writer J. Frank Dobie, of the Bronx Zoo lion house and Zoo Director William T. Hornaday, of the books like Jack London's Call of the Wild, and of the thousands of sketches, studies and articles for almost every major American magazine-an endless panorama of wild animal designs that issued forth from his brushes and pens.

Paul Bransom began his professional career at 13 as an apprentice draftsman assisting with mechanical drawings for patents, an exacting discipline requiring precise rendering of structure and details. That skill at drawing machines earned him a job with a railroad, where he drew locomotives and box cars, then briefly with General Electric Co. in Schenectady. At the ripe age of 17 he went to New York and the New York Evening Journal, where he drew a comic strip, "The Latest News from Bugsville."

In each job, however, he continued to pursue his avocational sketching of animals, a practice he had begun in childhood. In New York he haunted the lion house of the Bronx Zoo and eventually attracted the notice of William T. Hornaday, the Zoo's famed director. Hornaday, impressed with the young artist's work, granted him the unusual privilege of a studio in the lion house. Finally, with a portfolio of animal drawings under his arm, Bransom began the rounds of publishing houses. The editor of the Saturday Evening Post, then the nation's largest popular magazine, was so impressed that he bought four cover pictures and several smaller drawings on the spot. The world of comic strips has lost an artist and that of animal art had gained a master.

Paul Bransom first came to the Adirondacks in 1908, when the 22-year-old artist and his wife rented a cottage on Canada Lake for the summer. Next door was the summer camp of Clare Victor Dwiggens, one of America's greatest comic strip artists and creator of the popular panel "School Days." The retreat afforded Bransom the solitude and, of course, the access in the field to animal subjects needed to complete his growing list of assignments from the Post, Country Gentlemen, American Weekly, and other publishing houses. At one time the deadlines and the pressures were so great that a sign hung on the back door, "Please, no visitors until after five o'clock." In 1917 the prospering Bransom built his own Canada Lake camp near that of the artist Louis Sarka, and year after year since then he has spent his summers in the Adirondacks, gathering drawings and backgrounds which he translated into finished drawings in the winters of New York.

The living room of the camp, filled with mementos and lighted by a high north window, served for many years as both living space and studio. Today, the studio is in a smaller room dominated by a high drawing board, a comfortable chair in front of it, and the brushes and colors still conveniently at hand on a low table to the right. From his retreat has come much of Bransom's best work over the years. During the 1920's and the 1930's, some 35 magazines used Bransom's illustrations. He illustrated nearly 50 books, including Jack London's Call of the Wild, Kenneth Grahame's English classic The Wind in the Willows, and editions of Hunter's Choice by Archibald Rutledge. Book collectors today find his illustrations in books by such celebrated authors as Charles Roberts, Albert Terhune and Rudyard Kipling...

Today, at the age of 92, what does Paul Bransom think of these accolades and tributes? Recently, thinking only of his animals and his art, he wrote: "The winter wears on...I am impatiently waiting for the time we can return to Canada Lake. I've reached the age when like the old automobile, various important parts begin to wear out and cease to function correctly, but unlike this old car, the old body is not quite so easy to repair and install new parts, especially the eyes-so important to an artist. However, what with visits to various doctors who specialize in all different parts I manage to get to the studio almost every day to work on pictures which greatly interest me and I hope to finish."

*Reprinted from Adirondack Life, July/August 1979, courtesy of the author. Copyright 1979 by Adirondak Life. All rights reserved.