Frank Bellew

Frank Henry Temple Bellew (April 18, 1828 – June 29, 1888), American artist, illustrator, and cartoonist.

Personal

Bellew was born in India, in 1828 as the child of an Irish captain and his British wife. He died on June 29, 1888, at his daughter's home in New York.

He had two children, one a daughter, and a son, Frank P.W. Bellew, who signed his work "Chip," as in "chip off the old block." Bellew Avenue Road in Parade locality of Kanpur is named after Frank.

Career

Bellew drew for most of the notable publications of his time, including Frank Leslie's Illustrated, Harper's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, St.Nicholas, and humor magazines such as The Lantern, The New York Picayune, Vanity Fair (US, 1859-1863), The Funniest of Phun, Wild Oats, Puck, Judge, and the comic Life.

Bellew came to New York from England in 1850 and worked in the city his entire career. In 1931 Time magazine credited Bellew with having drawn the first Uncle Sam for a cartoon in an 1852 issue of The Lantern. This claim was discredited by Alton Ketchum in his book Uncle Sam: The Man and the Legend (Hill and Wang, 1959), in which he traced the first depiction of Uncle Sam back to a cartoon in 1832.

Bellew's November 26, 1864, Harper's Weekly caricature of Abraham Lincoln, "Long Abraham Lincoln a Little Longer," exaggerating the height and thinness of the president to absurd extremes, was popular.

Friendships

Because his wife's family lived briefly in Concord, Massachusetts, Bellew knew and socialized with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who visited Bellew once at his studio on Broadway in New York City.