Frank Bellew


Frank Henry Temple Bellew, American artist, illustrator, and cartoonist.

Personal

Bellew was born in Cawnpore, India, in 1828, the son of Francis-John Bellew, a British officer, and Anne Smoult Temple, of Hylton Castle.
Father of Frank P.W. Bellew, who signed his work "Chip," as in "chip off the old block."

Career

Bellew worked 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, 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, 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 very 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.
Thoreau and Bellew discussed philosophical matters, as Thoreau recorded in his Journals on October 19, 1855: