The Cheyenne Daily Leader

THE HUMOROUS ARTIST.

Interesting Account of Willard, whose Pictures are Well Known.

Everybody is familiar with a picture in which a little boy is seated in a cart trying to hold in a dog harnessed to a vehicle, but in fierce pursuit of a rabbit. One little girl sits beside the plucky boy, and another has been jolted out of the cart, while in the distance the dismayed mother contemplates the runaway. This spirited sketch was first painted on the side of a wagon in a village of northern Ohio, where Ryder, the Cleveland photographer, was struck by its merits. It was the work of a Mr. Willard, who had painted it as a bit of diversion to relieve the ordinary drudgery of his trade. Ryder gave the mechanic artist $200 for a copy of the sketch on canvas, and, repeated in photographs and chromos, it became popular all over the country. Willard's next great hit was "Deacon Jones' experience," a picture of family prayer interrupted by a fight between a cat and dog. Ryder doubled the popularity of this sketch by getting Bret Harte to write verses appropriate to it for the sum of $250. At the centennial the Ohio artist made his mark by another well-known picture called "Yankee Doodle." This is the familiar painting in which three continental musicians, two drummers and a fifer are leading the troops on the battlefield. All the figures are studies from life. The central figure, the brave old drummer, is a portrait of Willard's aged father. The fifer is that of a local performer on this instrument, much in request at parades of the militia, and the boy drummer is a portrait of a son of General Devereaux, president of the Atlantic & Great Western railroad, a boy at that time about twelve or fourteen years of age. Since then Willard has been busy at all sorts of job work, and has painted numbers of pictures, more or less popular. Perhaps the best known among them is the caricature of Raphael's celebrated cherubs, in which Butler and Kearney appear as the angels.

A painting called "Jim Bludsoe" was submitted to the New York public, and the art critics of the metropolis laughed it into obscurity. Willard was modest enough to acknowledge the justness of their censure, and he has fallen back to finishing photographs and drawing designs for advertisers. He is a man about forty-two years of age, of massive frame and unassuming manners. He still hopes to get means for a tour in Europe, where he may enjoy leisure to study art and overcome the technical difficulties of painting. - Buffalo Courier.