Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842–1904)
Sarah Wyman Whitman was a true pioneer of American book design. Not because of her gender (though she certainly was a path-breaker for working woman artists) but for her seminal graphic sensibility, which transcended the commonplaces of Victorian-era book design. Whitman was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1842. She might have settled into bourgeois life after marrying the prosperous wool merchant Henry Whitman in 1866, but instead, she embarked on a serious artistic career. She studied painting and drawing in France, but she was most profoundly influenced by the burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement in England, championed by William Morris and others.
 Whitman became interested stained glass work, and with characteristic zeal she established both a commercial design studio (Lily Glass Works) and a glass factory to supply it. It wasn’t until 1884 that she began designing books, first at the behest of her friends. This group included nearly everyone in the artistic and literary spheres of Boston, most importantly George Mifflin, a partner in Houghton Mifflin Co. Whitman would eventually become the primary designer for Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside Press (working with Bruce Rogers), and although she privately bemoaned her book-design responsibilities, she couldn’t bring herself to deny friends like Celia Thaxter, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sarah Orne Jewett, and James Russell Lowell.
Whitman’s style is eclectic, yet instantly recognizable. She preferred botanical motifs, but not the fussy Victorian nosegays of her predecessors. Whitman’s flowers usually consisted of one sinuous stalk, surmounted by a simple bud— the merest suggestion of a flower. Her style was undoubtedly inspired by Japanese woodblock prints of the ukiyo-e school, which were highly influential among the avant-garde of the day. Though her style is sometimes referred to as Art Nouveau, it is a spare, puritan version, stripped to the essentials. Other recurrent elements were gilt suggestions of the metalwork on medieval chained books: clasps, hinges and corners. In one inspired variation on this theme, for a two volume set of Thoreau’s Walden, the “clasps” take the form of laurel leaves— an insightful interpretation of the author’s own subversive spirit (“Grow wild, according to thy nature.”).
Whitman worked consistently on binding design from about 1889 until 1900. Some of the high points of her work include Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of The Pointed Firs, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Marble Faun," (which won a medal at the 1893 Columbian Exposition.). Her design for The Revolt of A Daughter by Ellen Olney Kirk depicts a leggy spray of poppies, curling around the entire casing. This “whole-book” approach may have been her innovation, though it was also used by W.W. Denslow and a few other designers.
In many of her designs, a flower rises out of a heart, in which (rarely) her SW monogram is contained. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that this motif symbolizes the artist’s own work, coming straight from heart. On her death, Whitman left much of her estate to the Tuskeegee Institute, the college for African Americans founded by Booker T. Washington. |
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