Thomas Fogarty

Thomas Fogarty (1873-1938) was an American illustrator of magazines and books. A native of New York, Fogarty studied with H. Siddon Mowbray and Carroll Beckwith in the city league of art students, eventually becoming an illustration instructor in 1905-1922. Over the years of teaching in the League of Art Students, Fogarty has become an influential instructor for a generation of 20th-century illustrators. Among his students were Norman Rockwell, Walter Biggs, McClelland Barclay, William Galbraith Crawford, Edmund F. Ward, and George Edward Porter. Fogarty was a practical teacher, giving assignments to his students akin to those they received from magazines. He gave his students a story to read and demanded that they develop an accompanying composition using authentic costumes and props. According to Norman Rockwell, Fogarty was especially attentive to authenticity, urging his students to "step over the frame and live in the picture." As Rockwell says: “If the author [of the story] was sitting as a character in the Windsor chair, the chair in the illustration should have been just like that, even if it meant that we all had to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to find out what the Windsor chair looked like. Similarly, Fogarty urged his students to present each figure as a real person with a background, and not just a stereotype. Rockwell recalled Fogarty's style as such: “To paint a picture is like throwing a ball into a wall. Throw it hard, the ball comes back hard. It’s hard to feel the picture, the public feels the same. ” Fogarty sometimes persuaded a cheap magazine to give him a task that he could pass on to his students; if the magazine used student work, this gave the student the start of a portfolio and success in the world of professional illustration.