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1875
- 1934
At one time, Harrison Fisher’s ‘The Fisher Girl’ was as well known as ‘The Gibson Girl’. Fisher made a name for himself in the history of American illustration due to his uncanny ability to paint beautiful women. His ‘Fisher Girl’ and, more importantly his ‘American Girl’, was recognized as the epitome of feminine beauty in America during the first quarter of the 20th century. She was lithe, elegant and beautiful, but also athletic, independent, and intelligent. Cosmopolitan magazine in the 1920’s called Harrison Fisher, “The World’s Greatest Artist” saying that “There is an underlying ideal that dominates his paintings. His ideal type has come to be regarded as the type of American beauty: girls, young with the youth of a new country, strong with the vitality of buoyant good health, fresh with clear-eyed brightness, athletic, cheerful, sympathetic, and beautiful.” They went on to say, “’The American Girl’ is practical, adventuresome, active, and above all, attractive. No one can portray more of this attractiveness than Harrison Fisher.”
Harrison Fisher was born in Brooklyn, the son of Felix Xiver Fisher and grandson of Hugo Antoine Fischer (sic), both artist immigrants from Bohemia. In 1886, the family left New York and moved to Alameda, California near San Francisco, and two years later Harrison’s mother died. In 1893, Antoine Fisher’s art was shown at the World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago, and he felt comfortable enough to open a studio on Battery Street in San Francisco. Felix Fisher had already started to teach his two sons to sketch and paint as soon as they arrived in California, taking them on camping trips up and down the Pacific coastline sketching the magnificent scenery. Harrison had shown promise quite early having excelled at drawing from the age of six. Coupled with his father’s training and natural talent, he enrolled at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, and as a teenager sold his illustrations to local newspapers. The popular national magazine Judge was soon publishing Harrison’s works, and he needed a separate studio in which to concentrate. Those early commissions brought him to the attention of the San Francisco Call, and he was hired as a staff artist drawing society functions, sporting meets, and illustrating news items. After a couple of years he joined the San Francisco Examiner, the largest newspaper in William Randolph Hearst’s stable, and sketched only news events. In 1897, Fisher was given a requested transfer to Hearst’s New York American. Barely two weeks later he got a job as in-house cartoonist and illustrator with the fabulously famous Puck magazine. His career was careening ahead with recognition from anyone who came into contact with his work. His name was growing in reputation and he enjoyed the recognition.
By 1900, he was doing freelance assignments for the Saturday Evening Post and received more commissions from other respected journals including McClure’s Magazine, Life, Scribner’s, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan. Hearst tried devilishly to keep him busy to deter others from commissioning this now famous illustrator. Hearst’s newly renamed magazine, The American Weekly, gave him more assignments than any normal illustrator could complete, yet he was able to continue to accept freelance work in advertising from Armour’s Beef, Warren Featherbone Co., Pond’s Soap, but the Saturday Evening Post kept him busiest. His greatest successes were with his vibrant drawings of beautiful American girls, which he immodestly dubbed ‘The Fisher Girl(s)’. They became much sought after and rivaled other illustrator’ idealizations of the American female.
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Photo: The
Society of Illustrators
In March, 1908, Success magazine published a milestone piece by Fisher illustrating an article by Oliver Opp entitled, ‘The American Girl.’ That article engendered the rage for Harrison Fisher’s beautiful girls. It occurred at a time when the average wage for a woman was approximately $5 per week, while the girls portrayed by Fisher were girls living a life of luxury at mansions in Newport, playing tennis or traveling with “our motoring millionaires” between country clubs. The article states quite boldly, that “since Charles Dana Gibson has given up his pen and ink work for oil paintings, Mr. Fisher has become his natural and popular successor.” In 1905, Gibson had retired and the stage was set for Fisher. Gibson was never able again to recreate the fervor for his ‘Gibson Girl’, for ‘The American Girl’ was everywhere and she was portrayed in color, a “well-bred and healthy minded American girl is delightfully free from pose: mistress of herself she looks out upon the world with a frankness and an assurance born of the realization that she is an accepted ornament of society and quite sure of respectful consideration.”
In June 1910, an article published in Cosmopolitan entitled, ‘The Father of a Thousand Girls’, adorned Harrison Fisher with a nickname forever more. That same year, the ‘Fisher girl’ had outdistanced all competitors in popularity. In 1913, Holland magazine mentioned that Fisher was making more than seventy-five thousand dollars a year and his success continued with illustrations published in literally dozens of books, and articles on the artist appeared in Vogue and periodicals everywhere. His ‘Fisher College Girls’ appeared in both The Ladies’ Home Journal and Scribner’s Magazine at the same time with neither complaining. Between 1907-1914, the ‘Fisher American Belles’ was published in the form of more than a dozen art books. By 1920, the efforts of Fisher’s earlier competitors Gibson, Christy, Hutt, and Boileau had all been forgotten.
The artwork of Harrison Fisher appeared on over 80 covers of the Saturday Evening Post. From 1913 until his death in 1934, Fisher created almost every cover for Cosmopolitan magazine. In his later years Harrison Fisher restricted himself to doing portraits of famous personalities and performers as well as society’s grand dames and gentlemen. In 1927, he did portraits of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, perhaps the crowning achievement in defining the era initiated by Fisher with art images and by Fitzgerald with words. In 1922, Cosmopolitan Print Department did a promotion for the sale of art prints by Fisher and Jessie Willcox Smith, entitled, “Let These Great Artists Help Decorate Your Home,’ and they sold prints for 25 cents each.
When he died in 1934, George M. Cohan delivered the eulogy. Harrison Fisher’s estate was valued at $297, 061, excluding real estate in Westport, Connecticut and California. The paintings were valued very low as it was explained that illustrations had already been paid for and published and therefore “are practically of very little value”. Fisher himself believed that they had little resale value. Some 113 pictures were appraised at $565 and 53 pen and ink drawings valued at $159. After his death, a relative kept a few paintings and burned over 900 of his remaining artworks, at his request.
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