EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 27 © 2019 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

54 paint for reproductions or commercial reasons. To make some money to pay the rent and buy food, he returned to making ivory miniatures. Around this time he had also met and fell in love with Louise Walther, a young pretty girl, daughter of the owner of the town’s seltzer-water works. Lulu, as she was called by her family and friends, reciprocated, but not her father who didn’t see with a kind eye her daughter marrying a penniless artist with no apparent future. In 1894, the couple eloped and moved to 1220 Park Avenue in Hoboken, where Schreyvogel also set his easel on the rooftop. Between 1894 and 1903, he and his wife travelled many times to the West, particularly among the Montana and Dakota territories. However, these were also lean times for the couple, who lived in impoverished circumstances. Both a landscape painting he had entered in a Philadelphia show, and aWestern one he had exhibited for another show in New York, didn’t sell or win any awards. His future as a Western painter seemed dim. However, 1899 brought a change of fate to his financial difficulties, as he, rather reluctantly, entered his painting ‘My Bunkie’ in the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design. The painting won the Clark Award for “best American Figure Composition painted in the United States by an American citizen without limit of age.” The prize was three hundred dollars and a gold medal! When the exhibition had opened, ‘My Bunkie’ proved to be the popular attraction. Crowds formed in front of the painting to marvel at it. Gustav Kobbe, a writer for the New York Herald , remembered the scene and wrote: Like everyone else, I admired it [‘My Bunkie’] and I asked, “Who is Schreyvogel?” The secretary of the Academy, Mr. Watrous, could not enlighten me. “You are about the hundredth person who has asked me,” he said, “but I can’t answer your question. I have never heard of the artist. We don’t even have his address to send him word that he has won the Clark