From Seven to Seventy

From 7 to 70: Memories of a Painter and a Yankee. For years I have wanted to make two cartoons-the first, dated 1800, to be simply a lovely woman holding a baby, and called, "New England with Her Child America." In the second, dated 1900, the mother, New England, is grown old and, clad in a poke bonnet and mitts, is sitting in a carriage with her son, America, who is now a bearded man smoking a black cigar. He is driving, the horse is running away, and she is trying to grab the reins. He yells: "Ma, if you don't stop that there will be trouble!"I was born in the middle of the last century, when this bearded man was still a youth, and I have watched his struggles throughout the years, until, without his mother's realizing it, he has slipped quietly from home to go out and mingle with the rest of the world, leaving her, a toothless and old grandma, to sit by the fire and dream that she is still the young mother of the cartoon. My ancestors were the Pilgrims, that first group of adventurers who embarked upon the Mayflower in search of a far-off land where they might worship in peace. They had not the qualities of the Puritans who came later. The Pilgrims were the impractical dreamers, and in one year were lectured by their backers because they spent too much time in prayer and too little in trade. The blood of nineteen different people who made that voyage flows in my veins and, try as hard as I may, I have never been able to find that this pure xivEnglish lineage had been broken during the first hundred years in America and certainly not for centuries before that in the old country. From them has come to me a want of deference, bred in them by a hatred of kings; a lack of rhythm-the nasal twang began by a desire to ridicule the Mother Church and ended by becoming a virtue; and an intense hatred of restraint in any form. From my father I must have received whatever artistic leanings I possess, although I believe them to be only a form of Yankee handicraftsman-ship. He was a better carpenter than a preacher, and his sketch book is filled with careful copies of many old masters which he saw abroad. I owe a deep debt to some one for curbing his imagination in one instance, however, for he wrote to an intimate friend on the day of my birth: "I have waited to reply to your letter that I might announce the name we had chosen for the bouncing boy whose voice I can now hear upstairs. But, since this year they have seen fit to take from us Daniel Webster and the Duke of Wellington, I think I shall name him Duke Webster."....