Isaac Brewster Hazelton was born December 30, 1870 in Boston, Massachusetts. His father,Isaac Hills Hazelton, was born in 1838. His mother, Mary Allen Brewster, was born in 1843. His parents married in 1869. They had four children, Isaac (b.1870), Olivia (b.1873), Margaret (b.1876), and Mary (b.1878). They lived at 88 Dover Street in Boston, where the father worked as a physician.
In 1873 the family moved to Wellesley, MA, where they lived on Washington Street.
In June of 1889, at the age of eighteen, he graduated from Wellesley High School, where he had been elected President of the Class.
In September he began to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied Engineering, Draftsmanship, and Art. He decorated several yearbooks while enrolled at school and played on the varsity football team.
In June of 1894 he graduated from MIT.
Within a few years his illustrations began to appear in books that were published in Boston and New York City.
In the 1900 census records he was listed as an "illustrator and designer." His sister Mary Hazelton was listed as a "portrait artist." She went on to have a significant career as a portrait artist in Boston.
In the early 1900s he illustrated books for Grosset & Dunlap, Lothrop Lee & Shepard, Herbert B. Turner & Co, Maynard & Co., and the John W. Luce Publishing Company.
On June 9, 1906 he married Margarita Thompson in Rhode Island. She was born April 14, 1882 in Winchester MA. She was the daughter of William Levi Thompson (b.1859) and Edith Margarita Meade (b.1856).
They married couple settled in Providence, RI, where he became an art instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design. One of his many art students was Robert A. Cameron.
On October 24, 1907 their daughter Pricilla Hazelton was born. She was their only child. The family spent each summer with the Hazeltons at their cottage in Maine on the island, Isle au Haut, which just south of Acardia National Park, on a boat-ride out to sea from Rockland, ME.
In 1912 he joined the art staff of the George Batten Publishing Company of NYC. The family moved to 216 Rutgers Place in Nutley, NJ. The artist commuted to work in NYC by ferry train to Pennsylvania Station at Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street in Manhattan.
He soon opened a private art studio at 2 East 23rd Street in Manhattan, from which he also pursued an independent career as a freelance illustrator.
1914 he painted an army recruitment poster, Men Wanted In The Army, which was widely distributed.
On September 12, 1918 during the Great War he registered with the draft board and was recorded to be of medium height, medium build, with gray eyes and brown hair. He was forty-four, married and the father of a child, so he was not selected for military service.
In 1919 he painted an advertisement for Clicquot Club Ginger Ale, which became the company trademark. The artist's daughter Pricilla posed for the Eskimo child featured in the iconic painting. The artist went on to paint many of the subsequent advertisements for this same product over the next twenty years.
During the 1920s and 1930s he continued to illustrate books, but also regularly contributed illustrations to pulp magazines. His work appeared in Adventure Magazine and Live Stories.
His work was also illustrated fiction that appeared in newspapers, such as The New York Herald Tribune and This Week Sunday Supplement Magazine.
During the 1940s he continued to illustrate books for Grosset & Dunlap, Scribners & Sons, D. Appleton Century and Harcourt Brace.
On January 27, 1943 I. B. Hazelton returned from work in NYC to the Erie Railroad Terminal in Jersey City, NJ, where he visited a bakery to buy some fresh bread for the family, when he suffered a heart attack and died at the age of seventy-three.
© David Saunders 2014 |
