Wesley Dennis

Wesley Dennis (born May 16, 1903 in Davisville, Massachusetts , † September 5, 1966 in Falmouth, Massachusetts) was an American author, painter and illustrator. He mainly specialized in horse books.

Life

John Wesley Dennis was a son of the native Englishman John W. Dennis and his American wife Ida, geb. Morgan. He grew up in Cape Cod ; the father worked in Boston and only came home for the weekends. He was picked up from the station in a horse-drawn carriage; the draft animal Tony was the first horse Wesley Dennis came into contact with. Tony's successor was called Bob and was a saddle horse.

Wesley Dennis left school at the age of 17. He failed the entrance exam for the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis ; therefore he followed his older brother Morgan to Boston, where he worked as a draftsman for the Boston Herald . Wesley Dennis got his first job at Boston American using his brother's sketches. For the next ten years he made a living from fashion drawings for newspaper advertisements, and also attended the New School of Design. He also joined the Massachusetts National Guard Cavalry in order to be able to meet his love of horses at low cost. He was able to keep his two polo ponies at state expense by making them available for emergencies. He also tended horses at Camp Devins , thereby expanding his knowledge of these animals.

In his first marriage he married the widow Olive Garland, who lived in Buzzards Bay . The Garland family owned a ranch in Santa Fe , New Mexico , where Dennis could study horse skeletons. After the divorce, he remained friends with the family.

Wesley Dennis contacted Lowes Dalbiac Luard and asked if he would like to accept him as a student. Luard refused, but promised him full support, after which Dennis left for Europe and settled in Paris . There, under Luard, he mainly trained in sketching quickly from memory. Luard also let him work in slaughterhouses, where he could deal with the anatomy and especially the muscles of horses. Dennis ended his stay in Paris in 1932.

In the USA, he mainly sold sketches of successful racehorses, and he also worked for various newspapers, including the Boston Globe . The Esquire commissioned him to draw a series of pictures of famous horses of different breeds. When Dennis sent some horse portraits to Bing Crosby for viewing, Bing Crosby bought the whole series.

His second wife, Dorothy Schiller Boggs, met Dennis in the late 1930s. On his honeymoon in Santa Fe, he came into contact with May Massey, an editor of Viking Press . Although this could not get him an illustration contract for other works, it gave him the idea of ​​writing and illustrating his own book. This is how Flip came about , which was published in 1941.

In the 1940s he moved with his family - two sons were born from his marriage to Dorothy Schiller Boggs - to Warrenton, Virginia , where he bought a farm and kept many animals, including a tame crow named Charlie. 1945 came out with Justin Morgan Had a Horse the first book by Marguerite Henry , which contained illustrations by Wesley Dennis. This marked the beginning of an intensive collaboration with Henry: the bestseller Misty of Chincoteague followed in 1947, and King of the Wind in 1948 . Wesley Dennis worked with Marguerite Henry until his death.

Other well-known horse books that Dennis provided with illustrations are a Black Beauty edition from 1946 and an edition of John Steinbeck's Red Pony from 1948.

In total, Dennis illustrated 150 books, more than ten million copies of which were distributed.

Wesley Dennis died in a hospital in Falmouth, Massachusetts, after six months of illness.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Esquire series on wesleydennis.com
2. ↑ The Early Years on www.wesleydennis.com
3. ↑ Annotated photos on www.wesleydennis.com
4. ↑ Biography at www.mistyofchincoteague.org
5. ↑ Death report in the New York Times