Early life and art training[edit]

Born in 1874 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Alonzo was the younger of two sons of Myra Barnes (née Mahan) and Alonzo Weston Kimball, a native of Massachusetts, who later became a very successful, highly paid insurance executive in Chicago.^[2][a] In 1882, when Alonzo was only eight years old, his mother died. Two years later his father married Ella Celestia Peak of Otsego, New York, and they resided in Evanston, Illinois, located a short distance north of downtown Chicago.^[2][3]

Alonzo demonstrated a keen interest and ability in art as a child. Later, during the early 1890s, he studied drawing and painting at the Art Students League of New York in Manhattan, and in 1894 he traveled to Europe to study with several renown artists.^[4][5] In France, Kimball trained with Jules Lefebvre at the Académie Julian in Paris, with Gustave Courtois, and in 1899 he exhibited at the Salon at the Académie des Beaux-Arts.^[6] He was also greatly influenced by the work of fellow American artist James McNeil Whistler.^[7][8] That influence was likely gained in Paris as well, at the Académie Carmen, an art school that Whistler founded in the French capital in 1898 and operated there until the facility's closure in 1901.^[9][10]

Career[edit]

In 1902, after returning to the United States from Europe, Kimball married and he and his wife Madeleine lived briefly in Evanston before they relocated to New York City.^[6][b] There he established himself professionally, quickly gaining a reputation for excellence in portraiture, especially for his oil paintings, watercolors, and pastels of female subjects or "American Beauties".^[11] He was commissioned for such works by both private and corporate clients, including major publishers. While still continuing his portrait work, Kimball also became one of the nation's leading illustrators during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Between 1903 and his death in 1923, he illustrated books for many of the nation's top writers. He also produced eight front covers for Saturday Evening Post as well covers and illustrations for assorted short stories and articles in other widely read weeklies and monthlies in the United States.^[12] Among those periodicals are Scribner's Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Holland's, Collier's, Metropolitan, Judge, The Ladies Home Journal, and "Sunday Magazine", which was a regular syndicated supplement to Sunday editions of The Boston Post, the New-York Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and various other newspapers across the country in the early 1900s.^[13][c]

Paintings and illustrations[edit]

Kimball's artwork exhibited unique qualities according to some reviewers of his paintings and drawings in the early 1900s. In a profile of him in the archives of The Saturday Evening Post, comments about those qualities in 1905 by art critic H. E. Bane are quoted:

"Even in magazine illustrations he goes deep beneath the mask of features. In his work laughter is something more than a turning up of the corners of the mouth; manliness is more than a gray eye and a square chin; beauty is more than a perfect contour."^[12]

Kimball produced his original works either on canvas with oils or on illustration boards with varying combinations of charcoal, soft and hard pastels, gouache, and transparent watercolors. In a 1914 newspaper interview, he shared a few details about the "recipe" of procedures and techniques he used to achieve the distinctive, idealized appearance of the subjects in his portraits.^[14] For one, he stated, "'I first place my model in every possible light until I find the one most becoming to her, and I leave out the little shadows about the eyes and mouth, which may be there because she's tired.'"^[14] He then outlined other refinements he makes in a portrait's development, such as enlarging the subject's eyes, defining the mouth, and adding important highlights. "'High-lights'", he explained, "'that trickle down the face in a broken line striking the eyelids, the eyeballs, the corners of the eyes, a tiny speck on the lower lid, one on the teeth and one on the lips, give a look of perfect health.'"^[14]

Despite his increasing freelance work in commercial art after 1905, Kimball continued to accept portrait commissions from private clients and to exhibit periodically in museums, galleries, and salons. In the spring of 1910 he traveled once again to Paris to submit personally two of his paintings for consideration by the Salon. His works then, as in 1899, were accepted for exhibition. Both 1910 paintings were portraits. One depicted his wife; the other, Madame Marguerite Lemon, who was identified as "formerly of the Metropolitan Opera Company". News writer and art critic Kathrine Douglas commented on Kimball's paintings while covering the annual art exhibitions in the French capital. In a feature titled "Americans in Paris Salons", which was published in The Detroit Free Press on May 8, 1910, Douglas describes the painting of Madame Lemon, noting that "She wears a gorgeous Persian costume and is in a dancing pose—a filmy scarf falling from her raised arm."^[15] Douglas also comments on Kimball's presence in Paris at that time: "This artist has devoted all his attention to illustrating of late years and has now settled in Paris with the intention of spending most of his time painting."^[15][d] Another example of Kimball's continuing interest in participating in public displays is his submission of illustrations in 1912 to the John Herron Art Institute for an exhibition in Indianapolis, Indiana. The institute accepted two of his works for the event held in March and April that year, an event devoted exclusively to showcasing the "Original Work by American Illustrators".^[16]

Kimball's portfolio of illustrations is extensive. A sampling of his pictures, which printers reproduced by photogravure or lithographic processes, provides some perspective on the style and diversity of artwork he furnished to publishers and to writers, many of whom were female authors. Some examples of his illustrations can be found in the short story "Pattie" written by Margaret Doane Gardiner and published in the June 1905 issue of Scribner's. Others decorate pages and portray plot scenes in Edith Wharton's 1907 novel The Fruit of the Tree and in her short story "The Pretext", which is presented in Scribner's August 1908 issue. Additional novels and short stories illustrated by Kimball include Edith Macvane's The Duchess of Dreams, released in 1908; "Grantham's Limitations" by Mary Heaton Vorse for the November 1908 issue of Scribner's; the 1911 novel Uncertain Irene by Katharine Holland Brown; Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy's novel World's End, published in 1914; the 1916 novel Kildares of Storm by Eleanor Mercein Kelly; and the 1918 novel Camilla by Elizabeth Robins.^[13]

Kimball's artwork in advertising[edit]

Between 1905 and the early 1920s, Kimball's artwork was used in newspaper and magazine advertisements throughout the United States to sell cameras, soaps, Torrington vacuum cleaners, men's and women's clothing, and a host of other products. An early example of Kimball's illustrations in advertising is an upperclass family scene he drew specifically for Kodak, one that shows children unwrapping one of the company's box cameras next to a Christmas tree. The advertisement with this illustration is in the December 2, 1905 issue of Collier's.^[17] In commercial advertising, clothing became Kimball's forte. Two examples of his work in that area are his depiction of a man fashionably attired in a 1909 newspaper advertisement for D. J. Kaufman's "The Men's Store" in Washington, D.C., and a large illustration that same year of a smartly dressed couple in a newspaper advertisement for "The Home of Quality Clothes“, the King-Swanson Company of Omaha, Nebraska.^[18][19] The Detroit-based business Weil & Company, a large furniture retailer that also publicized itself as "outfitters" for men and boys, announced in newspapers in April 1911 that "one of America's most prominent illustrators" had agreed to furnish the store a series of original artwork for its advertisements. "Mr. Kimball", Weil & Company noted, "is particularly excellent in his delineation of men, creating strong types of unique character and individuality."^[20] One more example of Kimball's commercial work is a far more elaborate, full-color 1916 advertisement that includes his painting of a young woman and her attentive male companion to promote John H. Woodbury's facial soap. Published in The Ladies Home Journal and in other periodicals, the "A skin you love to touch" advertisement offered readers a cake of soap with a print of Kimball's "new" painting "ready for framing" for "ten cents in stamps or coin" ($3 today)^[21]

By 1915, Kimball's commercial success as a portrait artist and illustrator had drawn the interest of executives in America's rapidly expanding motion picture industry. Pathé, a film studio with production facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey, contracted Kimball to design theatrical posters for some of the company's releases and to sketch portraits of the studio's most popular female stars at the time, including Pearl White, Florence Reed, Jackie Saunders, Jeanne Eagels, and Ruth Roland.^[22] Kimball's likenesses" of those actresses proved to be so well received by moviegoers that Pathé offered individual copies and sets of his drawings for sale. In December 1915, the New York trade publication The Moving Picture World announced the studio's intentions:

Exhibitors [theater owners] everywhere have been loud in their praise of the one-sheets [posters] advertising Pathe Gold Rooster plays. These are portraits of the leading women players in the various productions, and are all painted by Alonzo Kimball, whose fame as a painter of women's heads extends beyond the boundaries of the United States. For years he has been in demand by those magazines whose beautiful covers light up the newsstands and which covers undeniably help sales. The Pathe posters made from his sketches are beautiful enough to be framed, and their advertising value to the theater that shows them is unquestioned.^[23]

Kimball continued his work in commercial advertising in the years just prior to his death. By 1920, he and his wife Madeleine had moved from New York City to Ohio, where they lived in downtown Cleveland in an apartment building on Euclid Avenue. In the federal census for that year, Alonzo confirms his occupation in Cleveland, simply identifying it as "Artist/Advertising".^[24]