The art of Wallace Smith, 1888–1937

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Fantazius Mallare (1922).

One of the links this past weekend was to a lengthy essay about Ben Hecht’s censor-baiting novel, Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath (1922), a book illustrated by Hecht’s friend, Wallace Smith. I wrote a piece of my own about the novel in 2007, at a time when information about Hecht’s early fiction was much harder to find. Also hard to find was any other work by Wallace Smith, an artist of considerable accomplishment whose fine black-and-white illustration I hadn’t seen elsewhere. We now know that Smith devoted most of his energies to writing, working initially as a journalist. He later followed Hecht to Hollywood where he spent his remaining years writing novels and screenplays.

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Illustration by “Vulgus” from the Chicago Literary Times.

There were a few other illustrations, however, including more ink drawings in the same flat style he used for Fantazius Mallare. Given the state of the US economy in the 1930s one can hardly blame Smith for going after the money but his painted work proves that he could easily have made a living as a book and magazine illustrator. What you see here is some of his other black-and-white art. There are no doubt more examples to be found in the back issues of the Hecht-edited Chicago Literary Times where Smith was a contributor of small illustrations under the name “Vulgus”. Also worthy of note is Smith’s facility with lettering design, something he shared with J. Allen St John who created many stylish title designs for his Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books.


The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives (1923) by Ben Hecht.

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The Shadow Eater (1923) by Benjamin De Casseres.

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Blackguard (1923) by Maxwell Bodenheim.

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The Shining Pyramid (1923) by Arthur Machen.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil

4 thoughts on “The art of Wallace Smith, 1888–1937”

  1. I have a copy of Smith’s 1925 book OREGON SKETCHES, which has a number of his humorous sketches and drawings. I can send scans if you’d like to see them.

  2. Nice to see you post this. I had already read that article on Hecht’s novel last week, and thought at the time “this is exactly the kind of illustrator I would hope to see covered in ‘feuilleton'”.

    This is also a prime example of how the decadent movement did not die with Beardsley or Wilde, but survived well past Art Nouveau’s demise, lasting into the 1920s (and I can even think of books that were published in the 1930s that qualify). This pushes decadent-style work right up into the Art Deco era. I think we can also see “Decadence” as a style influencing early cinema; my favorite example being Nazimova’s “Salome”.

  3. Michael: I’d be happy to see more of Smith’s art. Best to send images to my Gmail address which has more storage capacity: incunabula@gmail.com

    Joe: That’s a film I still haven’t seen despite Orson Welles being in it. I’ll search it out when I’ve got to the end of my current David Lynch re-viewing.

    Jim: It’s true, the Decadent era is very prevalent in the early years of the 20th century, cinema included. I think this seems surprising because we tend to think of Modernism being an absolute break with the previous century when there was a lot of overlap. Edmund Wilson discusses this in Axel’s Castle, looking at the influence of Symbolist poetry on Modernist literature. There’s bound to be an influence because the people who were creating Modernist art were all born in the 1800s; a mere 25 years separate Bram Stoker’s Dracula from Murnau’s Nosferatu. Decadence was an aesthetic position whereas Art Deco (and Art Nouveau for that matter) was only a decorative style.

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