Thomas Nast Prints

About Thomas Nast

Thomas Nast was born in September 1840 in the army barracks at Landau in Bavaria, where his father played trombone in a regimental band. His mother brought him to New York in 1846. He studied drawing with Theodore Kaufmann and at the National Academy of Design, and in 1856 became a draughtsman for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. In 1862 he joined Harper's Weekly as a staff artist, and he stayed until his Christmas drawing of December 1886. Abraham Lincoln called him the Union's best recruiting sergeant for his Civil War pictures. His cartoons against William Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine helped bring the ring down in 1871, and he popularised the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey. His first Santa Claus appeared in the Harper's Weekly of 3 January 1863. Over the next two decades his Christmas drawings gave Santa the round shape, white beard and fur suit Americans still picture, along with a workshop at the North Pole and a desk of children's letters. In 1890 he gathered them into Thomas Nast's Christmas Drawings for the Human Race. In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt made him Consul General in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he died of yellow fever that December. His Santa drawings are black-and-white wood engravings, and they read clearly across a room.