1912 Thinker Sculpture Penseur New York City Harrison Cady Artist Print Fc3394

Cady was born in  Gardner,  Massachusetts, to a town selectman, Edwin Cady, who ran a local general store. His father fostered a love of nature and encouraged his art skills. Cady entered an apprenticeship with a local painter, Parker Perkins. His first publication came as early as 1894: an illustration in a supplement to  Harper's Young People   (signed  Walter H. Cady ).

Harrison was 18 when his father was killed in Boston. He moved to  New York City  and within a year found work as an illustrator with the  Brooklyn Eagle   newspaper. His salary of $10 a week made it possible for him to support his mother; the two lived in a  Greenwich Village  cold-water flat. He stayed at the  Brooklyn Eagle   for four years, while also freelancing to other publications.

Cady's first published comic strip was  Jolly Jumpers , which ran from 1912 to 1914 via the Publishers Press syndicate.

His income increased considerably after  Life   editor  John Ames Mitchell  signed Cady as staff artist and cartoonist. This led to a long career as a newspaper and magazine illustrator, as well as numerous  children's books, featuring both fantastic and realistic animal illustrations.

Cady's  Peter Rabbit   comic strip, which was based on  Thornton Burgess'  Peter Cottontail  stories  (as opposed to  Beatrix Potter's version) was launched by the  New York Herald Tribune Syndicate  on August 15, 1920. He continued to write and draw the strip for almost three decades. Cady had a long association with Burgess, illustrating the writer's books, including  Happy Jack , and his daily newspaper column,  Bedtime Stories . Their partnership spanned five decades, beginning with  Baby Possum Has a Scare   (c. 1912),  The Adventures of Reddy Fox   (1913), and  Buster Bear Invites Old Mr. Toad to Dine   (c. 1914). The series continued into the 1950s with  At Paddy the Beaver's Pond   (1950), followed by the reprint  The Animal World of Thornton Burgess   (1962).

After his escalating success through the 1920s, Cady and his wife Melinna decided to take an extended vacation. Touring Europe for two months in 1931, they visited London, Paris, Avignon, Brussels, Arles, Amsterdam, Rome, and Venice. In a letter to Harrison's mother, Melinna detailed their adventures:

"So far I like Paris as a place to live better than any other city.... The shops, the museums with the great works of art.... The  Follies!!! and on and on. Venice is filled with charm & great beauty & romance yet back of it all, I could imagine in time one might feel the past tragedy of the place. Every afternoon at 4, Harrison & I started in a  gondola  and just wandered in & out & around until 8 o'clock. It, no doubt, sounds utterly foolish at my age to be so enthusiastic about everything, but, my dear, I am living in a state of thrills."

Cady was very prolific, illustrating over 70 years for such publications as  St. Nicholas Magazine ,  Boys' Life ,[4]  The Saturday Evening Post ,  Ladies' Home Journal ,  Good Housekeeping   and  Country Gentleman . He illustrated the  Queen Silver-Bell   series by  Frances Hodgson Burnett.

In addition to his extensive illustrating of others' books, Cady also authored several books with his own illustrations, including his Butternut Hill series (1929),  Johnny Funny-Bunny's Picnic Party   (1928) and  Spring Moving Day   (1928).

When he retired in 1948,  Vincent Fago  took over the  Peter Rabbit   strip.  Avon  published Cady's  Peter Rabbit Comics   in 1947.

His work is on display at the  Thornton W. Burgess Museum  in  Sandwich, Massachusetts.

Rodin conceived the figure as part of his work  The Gates of Hell   commissioned in 1880, but the first of the familiar monumental bronze castings was made in 1904, and is now exhibited at the  Musée Rodin, in  Paris.

There are 27 other known full-sized  castings, in which the figure is approximately 185 cm (73 inches) high, though not all were made during Rodin's lifetime and under his supervision. There are various other versions, several in plaster, and studies and posthumous castings exist in a range of sizes.

The Thinker   was initially named  The Poet   (French:  Le Poète ), and was part of a large commission begun in 1880 for a doorway surround called  The Gates of Hell . Rodin based this on the early 14th century poem  The  Divine Comedy   by  Dante Alighieri, and most of the figures in the work represented the main characters in the poem with  The Thinker   at the center of the composition over the doorway and somewhat larger than most of the other figures. Some critics believe that it was originally intended to depict Dante at the gates of Hell, pondering his great poem.

Other critics reject that theory, pointing out that the figure is naked while Dante is fully clothed throughout his poem, and that the sculpture's physique does not correspond to Dante's effete figure.    The sculpture is nude, as Rodin wanted a  heroic  figure in the tradition of  Michelangelo, to represent  intellect  as well as  poetry.  Other critics came to see the sculpture as a self-portrait.    This detail from the  Gates of Hell   was first named  The Thinker   by foundry workers, who noted its similarity to Michelangelo's statue of  Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, called  Il Pensieroso   (The Think

The model for this sculpture, as for other works by Rodin, was the muscular French prizefighter and wrestler Jean Baud, who mostly appeared in the  red-light district. Jean Baud was also featured on the  1911 Swiss 50 franc note  by  Hodler.

The original is in the  Musée Rodin  in Paris. The sculpture has a height of 72 cm, was made of bronze and had been finely  patinated  and polished. The work depicts a  nude male figure of heroic size  who is tense, muscular and internalized, contemplating the actions and fate of the people while sitting on a rock. He is seen leaning over, his right elbow placed on his left thigh, holding the weight of his chin on the back of his right hand. The pose is one of deep thought and contemplation, and the statue is often used as an image to represent  philosophy. This and many other works by Rodin were groundbreaking for  modernism  and heralded a new age of three-dimensional artistic creation.

The work was enlarged in 1902 to a height of 181 cm. The monumental version became the artist's first work in public space. The figure was designed to be seen from below and is normally displayed on a fairly high  plinth, although the heights vary considerably chosen by the various owners.

Life   is an American magazine published weekly from 1883 to 1972, as an intermittent "special" until 1978, a monthly from 1978 until 2000, and an online supplement since 2008.  During its golden age from 1936 to 1972,  Life   was a wide-ranging weekly general-interest magazine known for the quality of its  photography, and was one of the nation's most popular magazines, regularly reaching one-quarter of the population.

Life   was published independently for its first 53 years until 1936 as a general-interest and  light entertainment  magazine, heavy on illustrations, jokes, and social commentary. It featured some of the most important writers, editors, illustrators and cartoonists of its time:  Charles Dana Gibson,  Norman Rockwell  and  Jacob Hartman Jr. Gibson became the editor and owner of the magazine after  John Ames Mitchell  died in 1918. During its later years, the magazine offered brief capsule reviews (similar to those in  The New Yorker ) of plays and movies running in New York City, but with the innovative touch of a colored typographic bullet resembling a traffic light, appended to each review: green for a positive review, red for a negative one, and amber for mixed notices.