The most powerful exhibition I saw last year was Auschwitz: Not Long Ago, Not Far Away at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. It examined Auschwitz—the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp in German‑occupied Poland—where more than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered between 1940 and 1945. Among the works on display were paintings by Józef Charyton (1909–1975).

Charyton was a Polish painter whose work is rooted in painful personal memories and emotional testimony. Born in Krupice, he became known not only for his artistic skill but for his deep engagement with Poland’s cultural and political past. During the Second World War, he witnessed the horrific treatment of the Jews firsthand—an experience that shaped a haunting body of work: scenes of Nazi atrocities, portraits of the Jewish people who remained, and images that memorialized the lives that were erased.

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For centuries, Jewish communities had lived in the towns of eastern Poland. Before 1939, Charyton lived in Wysokie, a small town in the Białystok region with a vibrant Jewish population. He lived among them, observing their customs, culture, and cuisine. In 1941, he witnessed the liquidation of the ghetto in his town. In that moment he made a promise to himself that became the defining force behind the art he would make for the rest of his life. He later spoke about living near that ghetto:

‘I saw from my window with my own eyes what fate one person can inflict on another. I decided then and there that I must preserve the testimony of this terrible truth in any way possible…if only I survived.’

After the war, he began creating journalistic drawings from his memories of the atrocities he had witnessed. You can’t help but have a visceral reaction when you see them.

By the late 1950s, Charyton furthered the vow he made by painting portraits of Jewish people as they told him their stories. He brought empathy to the experience as he rendered their faces with expressive depth, shaped by the arduous struggle for survival. He once described his studio as ‘a boat filled with the spirits of the dead.’

In Józef Charyton’s portraits, we see the full spectrum of humanity, that was marked by tragedy, carrying a bottomless sadness that refuses to be forgotten.

all images © Józef Charyton Estate

More to Know:

• There’s a collection of Józef Charyton’s works in the Podlasie Museum in Białystok that includes paintings, drawings, and memorabilia.

• Art from the Holocaust: 100 works from the Yad Vashem Collection at the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

• Here’s a review in The New York Times of an exhibit of recently discovered sketches by Marcel Roux, a member of the French Resistance and concentration camp survivor.

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This is Illustrated Journalism #171

As an artist growing up in Canada I revered the Group of Seven painters. They were and are part of Canada’s national identity. Artist David Milne (1882–1953) was a contemporary of theirs and shared a keen interest in the Canadian landscape, occasionally painting with them in northern Ontario and the Muskokas. But he was profoundly different from them. He preferred solitude. He was a loner. His work moved in a quieter, more distilled direction, especially after the First World War.

Milne was keen to experience the world. In 1903 at the age of 21 he moved from his small town in Ontario to New York City to attend the Art Students League, absorbing European avant-garde ideas of art. He developed a style that used bold color, spare compositions, and a belief that a painting could be built from the fewest possible marks. He was included in the famous Armory Show of 1913. He got married and moved upstate to Boston Corners, New York. But in 1917 he returned to Canada to enlist in the Canadian Army and serve in World War I. By the time he finished basic training and spent a month quarantined in England, the war had ended. He missed active combat.

Determined to witness war zones, he secured a commission as an official Canadian war artist. After the Armistice, he travelled to France and Belgium, where he produced sketches of ruined towns, flooded craters, shattered churches, and the quiet routines of soldiers waiting to go home.

These on-site watercolors on paper, 109 in all, were delicately made with feathered strokes, and muted, camouflage‑like colors. These works communicate a kind of sadness and absence. His technique responded to the fractured landscapes before him. They are simultaneously narrative and eerily abstract. There’s a dispassionate tone to his observations: towns and churches in ruins; tanks and still-rotting human remains scattering the landscapes.

Back in the United States, Milne returned to Boston Corners, carrying this instinct for solitude into his landscape painting and composing scenes of tree stumps, snowfields, lakes, and reflections down to their essentials. In 1929 he moved to Ontario’s north woods preferring life in his cabin, with a desire to protect the sanctity of his inner life and his undistracted experience.

His approach to painting was bold, original, and unlike anything else in Canadian art at the time. The art critic Clement Greenberg would later name Milne one of the three greatest North American artists of his generation. Over the decades that followed, he continued to paint steadily, his work entered major collections, and his reputation grew, lasting well beyond his death in 1953.

To some viewers, his wartime images may appear pale or hesitant, especially beside the more dramatic, patriotic work often associated with official war art. But that restraint is precisely what makes his approach distinctive: his paintings register the sadness of the battlefield rather than its heroics.

David Milne documented the stillness of war’s aftermath. He was a solitary modernist whose most haunting works arose not from combat, but from walking the emptied landscapes the war had only just abandoned.

All images © The Estate of David Milne - This is Illustrated Journalism #170

More to Know:

• The McMichael Canadian Art Collection, north of Toronto has a large collection of work by David Milne, as does The National Gallery of Canada.

Have you ever heard of David Milne or seen his paintings?

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In 1929, Kent set off for Greenland on a 33‑foot sailboat, determined, as he put it, “to experience the Far North at its spectacular worst.” He dropped anchor in a fjord south of Nuuk, the nation’s capital, only to have the boat break apart on the rocks during a midnight storm. While waiting for repairs, he began exploring the ice‑scoured terrain and quickly realized he had to draw and paint what he discovered. These early adventures became the basis for his bestselling 1930 book N by E.

Though born and raised just north of New York City, Kent was drawn throughout his life to rugged, primordial places: Monhegan Island in Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, Vermont, Tierra del Fuego, Ireland, and ultimately Greenland. The landscapes and seascapes he painted from these remote locales evoke the mysteries and vastness of the natural world. As he once wrote, “I don’t want petty self‑expression. I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity.”

Rockwell Kent created an extensive body of Greenland imagery inspired by the sculptural forms of mountains and icebergs, and the vast horizons that seemed to mark the edge of the world. Kent returned twice more, in 1931 and 1934 settling for long stretches in the tiny fishing village of Illorsuit, far above the Arctic Circle.

“It was perhaps the happiest and certainly most productive [time] of my life,” Kent later wrote in his Greenland Journal.

Rockwell Kent was not only an artist but an anthropologist. His notebooks and sketchbooks are filled with scientific notations and field drawings documenting daily life with the Inuit, including their routines and their culture. Many of his later paintings and prints grew directly from these on‑site observations of Greenlandic life and landscape.

Kent’s 1935 book Salamina recounts his second Greenland stay. It is part adventure tale, part memoir, enriched by his bold black‑and‑white drawings. He writes of fishing trips, Christmas celebrations, shared meals, and the friendships that grew within the small community of Igdlorssuit. Salamina, Kent’s Inuit housekeeper becomes a central figure when she and her daughter move into his hut for the year. The book portrays her with warmth, humor, and admiration and a cultural guide to the Greenlandic community he cherished.

Rockwell Kent’s illustrations strike me as stylistic rather than journalistic…a synthesis of iconic forms, graphic shape‑making, simplified figuration, and a transcendental sensibility reminiscent at times of William Blake. Yet within that stylization runs a deep connection to place. The qualities that define his Greenland work displays an affection for the culture and a profound reverence for light and landscape that continued to shape the art he made afterward. Greenland didn’t simply inspire Kent; it forged the visual language that became unmistakably his.

Epilogue:

Kent’s career spanned an unusually broad range of roles, from architect and carpenter to painter, illustrator, printmaker, explorer, writer, lecturer, and political activist. He earned both critical and financial success…especially through his celebrated illustrations for classic literature, most notably his limited‑edition Moby-Dick. After World War II, however, his outspoken socialist politics cost him commissions, and his rejection of modern art left him increasingly at odds with the art establishment.

More to Know:

• The New York Times offers a 10-Minute Challenge of Rockwell’s Artist in Greenland from 1960, which is a copy of a 1935 work called Iceberg that he painted in Greenland.

This is Illustrated Journalism #165

Honoré Sharrer (1920–2009) began her training at the California School of Fine Art and later at Yale, but she quickly soured on academic politics and withdrew. During World War II she worked as a welder in a San Francisco shipyard…a formative experience that instilled in her the dignity and fatigue of labor.

Sharrer’s early paintings aligned with social realism: empathetic, unsentimental portrayals of American working people. In 1943 she submitted an entry for a mural competition at the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts in Massachusetts. Workers and Paintings is a pivotal early work. The painting shows a line of working‑class men, women, and children standing in a cityscape, each holding or presenting framed reproductions of famous artworks: Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Picasso’s Girl Before the Mirror, and works by Brueghel, Daumier, Millet, and Rivera…artists known for their own depictions of labor, hardship, and everyday life.

Sharrer didn’t win the mural commission, yet the themes and her depictions of work and family demand a deeper examination from the perspective of visual journalism.

“It is these distinguished‑undistinguished players that moved and interested me.” - Honoré Sharrer

Workers and Paintings is composed much like Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio, a frieze‑like arrangement that offers a slice‑of‑life view of America. Sharrer’s people seem oddly disengaged from the masterpieces they hold. Their expressions are weary, almost mournful.The painting is allegorical. Each figure has a different meaning. A butterfly rests on the child’s head, a fragile, almost tragic emblem of a creative spirit perhaps slipping away. A Black man at the left holds a newspaper, while Black women and children at the right frame the scene, their expressions shaped by the racism they’ve long understood. How is this pregnant mother, and the baby she’s carrying, supposed to live alongside a painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau? Perhaps Sharrer is saying that this is the real America...with ordinary, diverse, unglamorous, and essential people. They are indifferent to the art they carry. These are the people who matter. These are the people art should see.

Sharrer’s preparatory studies for Workers and Paintings are tender, precise, and quietly subversive in their insistence that everyday lives are important. They also reveal something intimate and incisive. She struggled to get each figure right…the posture, the gesture, the emotional temperature. Sharrer wanted these drawings to show empathy without slipping into sentimentality. She was trying to understand not just how people look, but how they bear the weight of their lives. She’s not simply depicting workers. Their stories are more complex. The result is observational and quietly radical.

Sharrer moved to New York after the war to continue making her art. One painting was included in a prestigious 1946 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, an early sign of her remarkable, if complicated, trajectory.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Abstract Expressionism and later Pop Art were the dominant American art movements…led largely by men. Sharrer’s commitment to figuration made her increasingly unfashionable. Her left‑leaning politics during the Cold War didn’t help. She and her work were marginalized. Her paintings grew more surreal, and more pointed in its critique of American life.

In 2017 the Columbus Museum of Art organized a large survey exhibition of Honoré Sharrer’s paintings that brought her back into critical view after decades of obscurity. She expanded what figurative painting could be: empathetic, sly, politically alert, meticulously crafted and journalistic.

More to Know:

• A Dangerous Woman: Subversion and Surrealism in the Art of Honoré Sharrer, an exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art

• View Honoré Sharrer’s masterwork, Tribute to the American Working People, 1951 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

• View more paintings at Artsy.

Who are some of the undiscovered visual journalists you’ve found?

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This is Illustrated Journalism #163

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As 2025 winds down, I find myself revisiting a year of Histories of Reportage essays. I’m proud to have highlighted a wide range of artist‑journalists, some that go back as much as 400 years and others from more recent times. Each one bore witness to the newsworthy events and people of their era.

History and curation matter. For anyone who cares about visual journalism, these histories offer deep context and direction. They remind us why this work matters. I’m committed to introducing them to you.

Here are ten pieces from the past year that I’m especially proud of:

William Simpson: The Modoc War of 1872
As a renowned British “Special Artist” and war correspondent,, Simpson made on-the-spot drawings of a conflict between the U.S. Military and the Modoc Indians. Here’s the podcast conversation.

Estelle Ishigo: Scenes from a Japanese Internment Camp
During World War II, Ishigo chose to follow her Japanese‑American husband into an internment camp in Utah, documenting the harsh conditions through her art. Listen to the podcast.

George Robert Lewis: Haymakers in Golden Fields
Lewis filled his sketchbook with detailed drawings of haymakers in the English countryside, deepening our appreciation for the quiet dignity and essential nature of everyday work.

Howard Carter: Drawing King Tut
Carter moved between roles as artist and archaeologist, discovering and recording Egypt’s ancient treasures. Yet his drawings raise a question: were they science, or an artist’s interpretation? Here’s the podcast discussion.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Circus Drawings
Toulouse-Lautrec’s crayon and chalk circus drawings capture not only the spectacle of the ring but the humanity of the performers behind it.

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Pieter Bruegel: Peasant Life
Bruegel traveled widely through the Alps and Italy in the 1550s, sketching landscapes along the way, yet his graphic work reveals a profound empathy for everyday life.

Jo Mora: Chronicler of the Hopi
Mora had an artful curiosity for cultures of the American West. His pencil and watercolor drawings of Hopi culture and traditions embody the essence of visual storytelling and serve as a valuable ethnological record of a disappearing culture.

Barbara Hepworth: Hospital Sketches
Hepworth’s Hospital Drawings reveal art’s healing potential...an intimate expression of love and compassion that would later define her modernist sculpture in stone.

John Muir: Following His Footsteps through Yosemite
I retraced some of Muir’s path through Yosemite National Park. We both drew inspiration from the landscape.

Bob Dylan: Strike Another Match. Go Start Anew.
A single line from Dylan’s “It’s All over Now, Baby Blue” portends where we are at, and what we must do. Take a look at his painterly narrative works.

I’m looking forward to the new year and to bringing some fresh approaches to my writing, so I hope you’ll keep tuning in. I have several drawing trips planned, and I’ll be sharing stories and sketches from the road. I’ll also be making more podcasts (not the A.I.-generated kind), doing more lecturing, and beginning work on a book.

I believe illustrated journalism remains a perfect and important blend of image and story. If you value this work, your support means a lot. I’ll keep bringing you more.

Have a creative 2026!

Bill

In the summer of 1815, English painter George Robert Lewis (1782–1871) wandered the countryside of Northern Wales, filling a modest 6-by-9-inch brown leather sketchbook with exquisite pen and ink drawings. His focus: capturing the rhythms of rural labor, especially haymaking and harvesting.

Lewis captured peasants, laborers, and farmers immersed in the daily choreography of cutting grasses with scythes. He observed raking and turning them into windrows or haycocks, letting it dry before pitchforking it from carts into towering hayricks. His drawings honor the physicality of their work—the motion, the muscle, the quiet dignity.

While these images romanticize agrarian life, they gently obscure the harsh realities of poverty and toil that shaped the lives of rural workers.

Though Lewis was known for his versatile landscapes and commissioned portraits, these sketches shimmer with immediacy. He elevates the humble act of harvesting into something reverent, revealing a deep commitment to close observation and lived detail.

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Often collaborating with his brother Frederick, an engraver, Lewis would later transform these drawings into narrative-rich etchings, extending their reach and resonance.

This sketchbook provides a detailed and well-observed record of the summer George Robert Lewis spent in the English countryside. It deepens our appreciation for the quiet dignity and importance of the work we do.

More to Know:

• One other artist who captured the nobility of rural labor was Jean-François Millet.

I’m stepping away from my Substack for a short creative break: to travel, reflect, and recharge. In the meantime, feel free to explore past pieces in the Archive.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and war was declared with Japan; the U.S. government ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans be forcibly sent to internment camps. Artist Estelle Ishigo (1899–1990), a Caucasian woman, chose to be incarcerated with her Japanese American husband, Arthur.

Estelle was born in Oakland, California and moved with her family to Los Angeles at the age of 12. Apparently unwanted by her parents, she lived with a succession of relatives and at times on the streets and got in trouble with the law. She possessed a gift for drawing and a deep longing to reshape her life through art making. While at art school, she met and fell in love with Arthur Ishigo, a man of Japanese descent. In 1928 they married in defiance of law, family, and convention.

Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. The rationale was framed as a wartime necessity to prevent espionage and sabotage. In fact, the internment was driven by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and political failure.

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Estelle volunteered to go with her husband, first to the Pomona 'Assembly Center’, then to the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in Powell, Wyoming. There, Estelle became a witness to life at the camp. For the next three years, she drew scenes of people recreating the comforts from home and keeping their Japanese culture alive with Kabuki performances and sumo wrestling. She also captured the quiet agony of incarceration: elders wrapped in blankets against the bitter cold, families struggling for food, all trying to preserve dignity in a place designed to erase their existence.

‘Strange as it may sound, in this desolate, lonely place I felt accepted for the first time in my life.’ - Estelle Ishigo

It should be noted that Estelle Ishigo was recruited as a 'documentary reporter' by the War Relocation Authority (WRA)1 to record life at Heart Mountain. That didn’t hold her back from honest depictions of the brutal conditions found there. Her drawings resist sentimentality, revealing a sharper undercurrent of critique, like her depiction of boys working to free a kite from a barbed-wire fence and people gathering coal to stay warm during the winter.

After the War ended, Estelle and Arthur remained at the camp in order to record its last closing days. They returned to the Los Angeles area, where for several years they lived in poverty in a succession of trailer parks. A decade later she lost her husband to cancer, and her own health declined.

In 1984, fellow Heart Mountain residents found Estelle living in a squalid apartment, both her legs lost to gangrene. They made her last years pleasant ones and oversaw the publication of her 1972 book of drawings, Lone Heart Mountain. In 1990, while researching her life, documentary filmmakers rediscovered Estelle and her story.

Through her visual journalism Estelle Ishigo chose truth over silence. She endured hardships, poverty, obscurity, and illness and yet found both acceptance within the Japanese American community; and purpose, by telling the story of one of the darkest chapters in American history. Her love for Arthur, and her art, were beautiful acts of resistance.

All images courtesy of Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, California

More to Know:

• Estelle Ishigo's memoir is called Lone Heart Mountain.

• The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation maintains the WWII Confinement Site, preserving its history and educating the public about the unjust imprisonment of Japanese Americans there during World War II.

• Watch the Oscar-winning documentary 'Days of Waiting: The Life and Art of Estelle Ishigo', 1990 on Kanopy. Watch the trailer.

I previously wrote about French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and hypothesized that he was the visual journalist of his time. Toulouse-Lautrec created reportage of vibrant Paris nightlife…drawing dancers, cabaret singers and sex workers. But he also had a passion for the circus.

The urban circus, of which Paris had three, fascinated him. His favorite was the more working-class Cirque Fernando (later called the Cirque Médrano). This one-ring circus was housed in a modest wooden building in Montmartre, and was best known for its equestrian and trained animal acts.

Toulouse-Lautrec preferred being close to the show, which included bareback riders, acrobats, and clowns; so he could observe every detail. He would go backstage to watch the performers getting ready to enter the ring. He sketched quickly, made mental notes, and worked up his drawings from memory in more detail later.

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The crayon and chalk drawings he made are notable for their dynamic compositions, bold colors, and insightful portrayals of both the spectacle and the people involved. He documented these marginalized performers with empathy, envy* and immediacy. Some of these circus drawings were later reproduced as lithographs.

By the time Toulouse-Lautrec was thirty-five, he was suffering from alcoholism and dementia, most likely brought on by syphilis. His behavior was unpredictable, and often violent. Desperate, his mother had him committed to a sanitarium outside of Paris. It was while undergoing treatment that he created these drawings. In fact they helped persuade the doctors he was on the mend, ultimately leading to his release.

Yet Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s increasingly erratic behavior, worsened by heavy drinking, took a severe toll on his health and creative output. He died at the young age of 36. His vibrant circus reportage remains one of the more joyful parts of his legacy.

* Toulouse-Lautrec stood about 4 feet 8 inches tall. His torso was proportionate but his legs were severely underdeveloped. This impaired movement stemmed from a rare genetic disorder. While these physical limitations deeply affected his psyche and social life, it gave him a unique perspective on everything around him, which is why he immersed himself in the bohemian world of Montmartre, channeling his energy into art, including the circus. His drawings of the performers are raw and rhythmic, as if longing for a body that moved as gracefully.

More to Know:

• View more of Toulouse-Lautrec's Circus Drawings at Harvard Art Museums

• Toulouse-Lautrec's The Circus Thirty-Nine Crayon Drawings from Dover Books

• Watch a video from the Getty Museum about Henri Toulouse-Lautrec's Circus Drawings.

• With the text from this post, adding some links to legitimate sources and a few unique prompts I created a podcast about Henri Toulouse-Lautrec using Google’s NoteBookLM. Listen to it here or on Apple. There are more Illustrated Journalism podcasts here and on Spotify.

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I didn’t know how to begin to approach writing a study of the art of 16th C. Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1526–1569), known for his vivid, unsentimental depictions of everyday peasant life in Flanders (today’s Netherlands). I will proceed on the premise that his work qualifies as visual journalism. Bruegel lived at the same time as Michelangelo and Raphael, but while they focused on grand religious themes, he painted real depictions of people with honesty, humor, and heart…with biblical references.

The 29 celebrated paintings completed in the final five years of his life teem with vignettes of rural life—scenes that elevate the mundane with quiet human dignity: weddings, labor, games, and grief. Peasants gather, farm and hunt, share meals and relieve themselves, dance at festivals, and perform their daily rituals.

But his works are not without mystery and symbolism. Bruegel was a master of embedding biblical narratives within the fabric of his own 16th-century world—layering sacred stories with the political, social, and religious tensions of his time. The Procession to Calvary, 15641, for instance, is a veiled critique of Spanish rule and the brutal suppression of Protestantism in the Netherlands.

But was Bruegel a visual journalist? His drawings hold the key. Bruegel was a keen observer of the world around him, and his graphic work reflects a deeper presence within everyday life. He traveled extensively through the Alps and Italy in the 1550s, sketching landscapes mostly. He often inscribed in his drawings with 'Naer Het Leven' or 'Studies from Life.' But these scenes are often composites with imagined villages populated with characters and drawn from his memory and imagination.

Bruegel also made allegorical drawings that were used as guides for etchings made by skilled printmakers. These works were biting, imaginative, and often moralizing. The print series’ The Seven Deadly Sins and The Virtues are based on his drawings and are filled with grotesque figures, symbolic creatures, and densely packed scenes that critiqued human folly. These prints allowed his reportage to be more widely seen.

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Bruegel acted as both a witness to his times and a commentator, drawing on popular narratives to create compelling scenes of daily life. He wasn’t so much a documentarian as he was a storyteller, and a beautiful one at that.

1

Pieter Bruegel on Film:
There is an extraordinary film, The Mill and the Cross (2011), that re-creates Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Procession to Calvary (1564). The film reimagines it as a living tableau, immersing the viewer in a bustling 16th-century Flemish landscape that teems with peasants, soldiers, children, animals and more. It also includes the execution of a Protestant man by the Spanish militia, that Bruegel himself had witnessed.

Look closely to find the biblical depictions, like Christ staggering beneath the cross and the sorrowful Mary that all seem to go unnoticed. High above, a windmill seems to suggest a divine presence. Calvary itself is in the distance, marked by torture wheels and a crowd gathering to watch the crucifixion. Bruegel’s painting bears the message that life goes on, indifferent to suffering. People can be absorbed in their own lives while missing the deeper meaning unfolding around them.

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More to Know:

• You can view some higher resolution images of paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder at Google Arts & Culture and Obelisk.

• Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints by Nadine M. Orenstein is available on Amazon.

I wrote about German illustrator Fritz Busse (1903 -1979) before, but he requires another look, particularly at his evocative cityscapes, that capture the dynamic energy of urban environments.

From childhood, Busse was uprooted. He was born in Luxembourg, studied in Hamburg and Munich, Germany, moved to Austria for a time, before settling in California. He always carried a sketchbook.

In 1952, Busse published his first sketches in the book, Stuttgarter Skizzen (Stuttgart Glossary) with publisher Hatje Cantz Verlag, which earned him some recognition.

More of his European sketchbooks were published, until 1956, when Dr. Basil Vlavianos, the Greek-American publisher of the National Herald (Ethnikos Kēryx) newspaper hired him to create a series of sketchbooks of various American cities.

Busse had the ability to capture what was unique about New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, New Orleans and San Francisco. The line work in his gritty art of urban scenes have a delicacy and immediacy. There’s variety in how he arranges his books; with full page paintings, vignettes and black and white spots. He would shift the time of day, the season and the occasion. He’d vary his subject matter with diverse narratives of urban life.

Fritz Busse found a home in cities. This love for places is what made him a unique and successful reportage artist. Here's a selection of his books about cities:

Stuttgart:

New York:

Washington, D.C.:

Boston:

Fritz Busse published sketchbooks of five more cities. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. Illustrated Journalism will make you more worldly.

Munich:

New Orleans:

Hamburg:

Berlin:

San Francisco:

More to Know:

• The Fritz Busse Archive of original ink and watercolor illustrations is held in the Special Collections at California State University in Sacramento.

• Read how Fritz Busse draws the New York of 1956.

In 1891 Howard Carter (1874-1939), an Englishman artist, was sent at the age of 17 to Egypt to document discoveries at the tomb of Beni Hasan. At the time, making on-site drawings and watercolors was the only way to accurately record ancient painted wall hieroglyphics and decorations. He studied their symbolism and visual storytelling. Carter worked slowly and meticulously, developing skills that proved invaluable and artful. For his next commission Carter assiduously made drawings of wall reliefs at the excavations at the temple of Queen Hatshepsut, near Luxor.

Back in England he went through some financial difficulties relying on his artistic talents to make a living, selling paintings and working as a freelance artist. Yet he remained well-known for his epigraphic work and his ability to combine accuracy with artistry.

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In 1909, Carter was called back to work in Egypt as both archaeologist and artist under the patronage of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, a wealthy aristocrat who funded excavations in the Valley of the Kings, where he secured a fifteen-year permit to dig in the region. Carnarvon financed this endeavor partly through a £500,000 marriage settlement from his ex-wife, an heir of the Rothschild family.

On November 4, 1922, Carter’s team discovered the entrance to King Tutankhamun’s tomb. When they opened the burial chamber a few months later, they found a treasure trove of artifacts, much of it stacked in a glorious mess. Preserving and documenting each item was an immense undertaking. Carter meticulously sketched and described each piece.

It took Carter and his colleagues ten years to document and clear the tomb. His discoveries and invaluable insights into ancient Egyptian burial practices and art made him famous. He began his definitive tome of the experience in 1931, which he was unable to finish. He died in 1939.

Howard Carter’s role in this endeavor raises numerous thought-provoking questions. Was his excavation seen as a legitimate archaeological pursuit or more akin to tomb raiding? Did his passion lean more toward scientific discovery or artistic interpretation? How authentic were his sketches? Could they be considered visual journalism? There’s much to examine when assessing his legacy, yet he was the enthusiastic archaeologist who unearthed Tutankhamun’s tomb, documented its riches through art, and brought a wealth of Egyptology to the world. While King Tut’s treasures are housed in the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, his mummified body rests undisturbed in his sarcophagus, preserved within a climate-controlled glass case for tourists to visit in the Valley of the Kings.

The Mummy’s Curse is the legendary belief that anyone who disturbs an ancient Egyptian tomb, especially that of a pharaoh, will suffer misfortune, illness, or even death. Several individuals involved in the King Tut excavation, including Lord Carnarvon, died under mysterious circumstances.

More to Know:

• The Griffith Institute at Oxford University has an archive of Carter's drawings, maps, journals and diaries.

• Learn more about The Epigraphic Work of Howard Carter here.

• Read an article about the Discovery of King Tut's Tomb at ThoughtC.

Pope Francis died on April 21, 2025. Sede Vacante is the latin term for the time between his death and the Concla…

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Joseph “Jo” Jacinto Mora (1876-1947) can certainly be regarded as a true polymath with his diverse talents as a cartographer, sculptor, photographer, painter, illustrator, muralist, and author. In 1880 Mora and his family moved from Uruguay to the United States. He studied art at the Art Students League in New York and worked for Boston newspapers as an artist. Although, much of his early life was spent on the road, discovering America. He wasn’t the type to just pass through.

In 1904 he moved to Keams Canyon, Arizona, immersing himself in the rich cultures of the Hopi and Navajo Indians, learning their languages and capturing their traditions through photography1, sketches, and paintings, with a particular passion for their Katsina2 ceremonial dances and attire.

Katsina rituals are central to Hopi spiritual and cultural life. These ceremonies honor the spirit beings representing elements of the natural world, ancestors or cosmic forces. The rituals involve intricate dances performed by men wearing masks and regalia, symbolizing the Katsinas they embody. The ceremonies are believed to bring blessings, such as rainfall, fertility, and protection. Katsina dolls, carved wooden figures, are significant, as they also represent the spirits and are used to teach children.

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After his time with the Hopi, Mora traveled by horseback along the Spanish Mission Trail in California before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. He began his career as an illustrator, focusing mostly on cowboy life, although he also painted large murals and sculpted a bas-relief using public works grants from the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

In 1905 Mora wrote to his parents, ‘If I don’t leave now, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life here.'

His claim to fame and financial success came from the illustrative maps of California cities, parks, and other western U.S. locales he created and mostly self-published.

Jo Mora’s detailed renderings of cowboy life and maps are a fascinating blend of narrative and informational realism, but it is his pencil and watercolor drawings of Hopi culture and traditions that embody the essence of visual storytelling and serve as a valuable ethnological record of a disappearing culture.

all images © Jo Mora Collection

More to Know:

• I discovered Jo Mora's work wandering into the Trotter Galleries in Pacific Grove, California.

• Check out the Jo Mora Collection at the Monterey History and Art Association.

• The Life and Times of Jo Mora: Iconic Artist of the American West, 2022 by Peter Hiller is the definitive biography.

• Jo Mora wrote Californios: The Saga of the Hard-Riding Vaqueros, America’s First Cowboys , 1949 and Trail Dust and Saddle Leather, 1946

• Find lots of illustrative maps by Jo Mora in the David Rumsey Collection

Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) was an English modernist sculptor renowned for her forms of elegant abstraction. What is a lesser-known yet significant aspect of her art practice was her skill for in situ drawing.

Following her daughter Sarah’s hospitalization in 1944, Hepworth formed a close bond with the surgeon Norman Capener who treated her, which led to an invitation to observe surgeries at clinics across London and Western England. From 1947 to 1949, she created a series of nearly 80 drawings of surgeons in operating rooms.

She worked in ink, crayon and pencil with oil glazes on gessoed surfaces that she carved into…a technique that informed her sculptural practice.1

Hepworth was struck by the parallels between these surgeons and artists, noting the close connection between their approaches, their shared tools and meticulous attention to detail, both aiming to enrich the human experience.

Hepworth’s drawings show the surgeons’ engagement in their work rather than the operations themselves. They capture their dedication, precision and collaboration in the operating room.

'From the very first moment I was entirely enthralled by the classic beauty of what I saw there; classic in the sense that architecture and function were perfectly blended and purity of idea and grace of execution were in complete harmony.'
- Barbara Hepworth

For almost three years, her series produced many diverse portrayals, from distant observations of surgical scenes to intimate studies of the surgeons’ delicate hands.

These early drawings document Hepworth’s commitment to narrative realism. This experience deepened her artistic vision, her belief in the fundamental principles of abstraction and creation as a spiritual pursuit, that’s almost sacramental.

Hepworth’s Hospital Drawing Series convey Art’s healing potential and poignant expressions of love across a spectrum of relationships, from surgeon and patient to mother and daughter, and ultimately, sculptor and stone.

More to Know:

• The Hepworth Wakefield is in West Yorkshire, England

• Barbara Hepworth: The Hospital Drawings is available on Amazon.

There's a modesty to the drawings of Sister Maurice Schnell (1830-1902). She was a 19th C. nun who applied her creative talents with a deep love of place, to teach art and to honor God.

Sister Maurice was a member of the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, a religious order of Catholic Sisters located in Indiana. After immigrating from Germany with her parents, sister and brother in 1846, she traveled by horseback to Madison, where she entered the convent, when it was just a log cabin. She professed her vows in 1854 and taught art and science there for 50 years.

Between 1846 and 1889, Sister Maurice made intimate sketches of the Saint Mary's grounds. They display a steady hand and a calm demeanor. The lines are precise with elegant calligraphy that tell the story of her daily life and some significant events, that offer a glimpse into the life of a religious woman of the time.

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I wrote previously about her drawings, and while they may seem naive suggest a deep caring and love of place.

Illustrated Journalism

Sister Maurice Schnell: Nun and Artist

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3 years ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Bill Russell

While she lead a cloistered life, she seems to communicate a desire to visit beyond the buildings on the property and experience life more fully. She draws the gutted building that was the novitiate for the Sisters, and some curious anecdotes about the workmen there.

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