FIRST SOJOURN IN CHICAGO
Reading edition
The artist has a studio near the McVickar Theater on Madison Street. It is the typical atelier of the Victorian Eighties: oriental drapes, screens and pottery. Jules Guerin, then an art student and later a contributor to Century, Harper’s and Scribner’s, is clearing up and tidying for the day.
Mr. Bromley takes you to Lyon & Healy. Yes, Mr. Lyon, or maybe it was Mr. Healy, can start you as an apprentice. However, a young man beginning a career should be most careful in making his selection. You have been careful. You want to be an artist. But the business of Lyon & Healy is musical instruments, not art.
Next morning you are introduced to Mr. Rand, or Mr. McNally. A Mr. Martin then sends you upstairs, a couple of flights, to Mr. Robinson in the designing and engraving department. Beginners do not receive any pay, but you are put to work at a long table facing a row of windows and with yards and yards of unbleached cotton-cloth stretched on a wire at your back. You are now learning to engrave tints on wood-blocks—under the erroneous impression that designers and illustrators engrave their own blocks.
Mr. Bromley has found a room for you at the home of a friend, an art dealer. It is at Vincennes Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. You walk to and from Rand McNally’s, located on Monroe Street, dreaming happily.
One morning, after a few weeks of getting nowhere, for you are no master of tint-cutting, it percolates through your skull that inasmuch as wood-engravers never seem to be doing any designing probably designers never do any engraving.
A momentous discovery, this, for you have broken into your last twenty-dollar gold piece—as a matter of fact there is just about enough left to pay for taking your trunk to the depot and to buy a second-class ticket back to that printing shop in Northern Michigan.
“Sometime, if you care to come back,” states Mr. Robinson, in a letter which must have been written immediately after your departure, “and if you will remain half an hour later in the evening and sweep out, and come in a half hour earlier in the morning and dust, Rand McNally will pay you three dollars a week.”
