Although Thomas Nast certainly didn’t invent the idea of Santa Claus as “chubby and plump, 一个快乐的老精灵,” he played an unmistakable role in how people from the Civil War onward “see” Santa. The jolly elf described in Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 “A 访问 from Saint Nicholas” is here, albeit dressed in Stars and Stripes and distributing gifts to soldiers, 不是小孩. While many on the home front were experiencing a Christmas marked by wartime deprivation,se soldiers on the front revel in the distribution of gift boxes and Christmas festivities. Despite the chill in the air,ir excitement is palpable. 哈珀 设置第6页的场景:

Children, you mustn’t think that Santa Claus comes to you alone. You see him in the picture on pages 8 and 9 throwing out boxes to the soldiers and in the one on page 1 you see what they contain. In the fore-ground you see a little drummer-boy, 谁, 打开他的圣诞礼盒, 突然，一个盒子里的杰克出现了, 令他吃惊的是…一个士兵, 在左边, finds a stocking in his box stuffed with all sorts of things. 另一个在他身后, 有一根meerschaum烟斗吗, just what he has been wishing for ever so long …

The description goes on to note the soldiers playing at their “merry games,爬上一根涂了油的杆子, 追逐一只涂了油的野猪, playing football as they await their Christmas dinner. Nast did not, however, resist politicizing his Santa. In addition to his patriotic garb and the fact that he is visiting a 联盟 camp, Santa holds a puppet, “entertaining the soldiers by showing them Jeff Davis’s future. He is tying a cord pretty tightly round his neck, Jeff seems to be kicking very much at such a fate.”

Later in the same issue, Nast draws a more sentimental take on Christmas Eve, 再次描绘圣诞老人, but focusing on the 图像s of a woman and child at home opposite their husband and father on the battlefield. According to Nast biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, this 图像 touched the hearts of readers:

Letters from every corner of the 联盟 came to the Harper office with messages of thanks for that inspired picture. A colonel wrote to tell how it had reached him on Christmas eve, had been unfolded by the light of his own camp-fire, 他的眼泪是怎样落在书页上的. “It was only a picture,” he said, “but I couldn’t help it.”

托马斯·纳斯特是谁?

Renowned for giving us the iconography of the Republican elephant and Tammany Tiger—among many others--Thomas Nast was born at a military barracks in Landau, 1840年的德国, where his father was a trombonist in the 9th Regiment Bavarian Band. 和他的家人, Nast emigrated to the United States as a young boy and attended school in New York City, where his talents as an artist (rather than a scholar) soon became apparent. 仅仅十六岁, Nast brought some of his drawings work to the publishing house of Frank Leslie, 谁 assigned him to draw the ferry landing at Hoboken on a bustling Sunday. Leslie later admitted that he had “no expectation of the little fellow’s doing it, gave him the job merely for the purpose of bringing home to his youthful mind the absurdity of his application.“不过, young Thomas returned the next Monday morning with a completed drawing, Leslie在 1856年10月11日发行 弗兰克·莱斯利的画报. Thus began a career that lasted nearly a half century, with Nast providing material for many of the popular illustrated newspapers of the era, 包括 莱斯利的, 《利记手机官网》, 哈珀的每周直到1886年，他一直与他交往. 还有他的内战插画 哈珀尤利西斯。S. Grant to have done “as much as any one man to preserve the 联盟 and bring the war to an end."在 哈珀, 纳斯特着手重建, 总统竞选活动, 政治腐败, 移民, 以及今天的许多其他问题.

晚年, Nast struggled—most of his fortune was lost to a swindle in 1884 and his style of political cartooning was going out of vogue. His final published illustration—a double-page spread featuring Santa visiting the White House and leaving gifts for the Roosevelt children--appeared where it all began for Nast, 在 莱斯利的每周. In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt offered him an appointment as United States Consul General to Guayaquil, 厄瓜多尔, 纳斯特接受了, 在那年七月到达. 在12月, 这位伟大的插画家去世了, victim of an outbreak of yellow fever ravaging the country.