March 30, 1868

Maud Humphrey was a popular American book illustrator. Stephen J. Gertz outlined her life in his blog Booktryst due to her status as a successful book illustrator.

Maud Humphrey was born in 1868 [March 30] to a well-to-do family in Rochester, New York. Demonstrating a precocious talent for drawing, by age twelve she was taking art classes and soon became one of the founding members of the Rochester Art Club. As a teenager she began to receive commissions to provide illustrations for children's magazines.

At age eighteen she went to New York City and enrolled at the new Art Students League, later making the obligatory pilgrimage to Paris to continue her studies at the Julian Academy. Returning to New York, her ambition and ability were rewarded by her era: it was the beginning of what is now known as the golden age of book illustration, which dawned in the mid-late 1890s with the development of improved printing techniques and color-printing processes, and set when World War I began. In 1898, Baby's Record was published by Frederick A. Stokes Co. of New York. Issued in three simultaneous editions featuring one, six, or twelve color illustrations (all here), the book was by Maud Humphrey, who, in the same year, married Dr. Belmont De Forest Bogart

She became a highly in-demand illustrator for magazines, children's books, and advertising, her idealized and highly sentimental portraits of rosy-cheeked babies and youngsters very popular. Ivory Soap was a client, as was Mellin's Baby Food. ....

Maud Humphrey, along with Jessie Wilcox Smith, Bessie Pease Gutmann, Queen Holden, and Frances Brundage, was amongst the most sought-after illustrators of the late nineteenth through early twentieth century, her annual income often reaching upwards of $50,000. The average illustrator was earning approximately $4,000.

The combined income of the Bogarts ...[allowed an elegant lifestyle]. The family lived in a large, posh apartment on New York City's Upper West Side, and retreated to an elegant "cottage" on their 55-acre estate on the shore of Canandaigua Lake in upstate New York.

Here is one of her early drawings: :"Girl With Cat", (1894).



Maud Humphrey's husband died in 1934. She herself in 1940. Had she lived a little longer she would have been Betty Joan Perske's mother-in-law. The little boys in her drawings are often modeled on her son, Humphrey.