Biography of Homer W. Davenport, 1899, State of Oregon
Surnames: Davenport, Geer

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Oregon Native Son, Vol. 1, June 1899, page 80-90

HOMER C. DAVENPORT.
Written by his father, T. W. Davenport

The subject of this sketch was born on his father's farm, located in the Waldo
Hills, some five miles south of Silverton, Marion county, the date of his
birth being March 8, 1867. His mother's maiden name was Miss Flora Geer,
daughter of Ralph C. Geer. She was married to the writer of this article
November 17, 1854, and died of smallpox on November 20, 1870.

Homer has no doubt been the subject of more "write ups" than any other
newspaper artist in the United States.

His appearance among the foremost cartoonists was so sudden and unheralded,
that writers of all degrees were tempted to try their descriptive and analytic
powers upon him. Of necessity they had not much data to draw from, for he had
no diploma from an American art school; had not been in England, Germany,
Italy or France; in fact, had not been educated in art anywhere; and as he was
not a lineal descendant from artists, as any one knew, it is not strange that
many of the "interviews" were as grotesque as the artist himself could wish.
He never claimed to be an artist, and so when questioned as to the employment
of his youth, he generally gave such facts as would make a humorous picture,
such as firing on a steamboat, wiping locomotives, breeding and fighting game
chickens, playing clown for a circus, feeding lions and tigers in a menagerie,
clog dancing in a minstrel show, umpiring baseball games, or any other of the
thousand and one things boys attempt in the rattle-brain period of existence.

As such things made up the greater part of his antecedents, upon which his
interviewers delighted to dwell, the opinion became prevalent that his case
lay outside of heredity, and that early art training is unimportant. If from
such vagaries, and without previous training, a green Oregon boy could enter
the field of art and carry off high honors and emoluments, why not others do
the same? Hence all over the Pacific coast boys who had never taken a thought
of how pictures are made, began to draw cartoons, full of enthusiastic purpose
to become famous like Homer.

Young men just beginning to encounter the earnest tug of existence and wanting
to find an easier way of making a living, and boys who had seen Davenport's
pictures in the Examiner and Journal and were stirred with emulation, these
brought samples of their art yearnings to be examined by the celebrated
cartoonist (luring his short visit in Salem two years ago. One hopeful woman
desired him to leave the train and go six miles into the country to see the
work of her darling boy, who had been drawing for only three months, and never
made a line until he was 12 years old. One of Homer’s early companions, now
editor of a Seattle paper, said “it is too bad so many young people should
abandon pursuits in which they can make a living, and spend their precious
early years in drawing hideous pictures and dreaming of brilliant success in
art.” To satisfy his regret of such a condition, he proposed to publish his
opinion that Homer's success is the worst calamity that ever befell the boys
of the Pacific coast. Such a statement, how- ever emphatic, will not deter any
ambitious boy, for has not everybody seen the catchy write-ups of Homer, who
was pictured in spicy phrase as a queer, jolly fellow; a veritable freak of
nature, given to all sorts of vagaries and having a disrelish of book
learning, as well as any remunerative employment, and that his present success
is the result of one or two lucky incidents?

One that he painted on the outside of a henhouse, a gamecock so lifelike that
his bulldog thought it a veritable live cock and bristled for a fight every
time he passed that way; another that of a friend having confidence in the
sagacity of the dog, suggested to Homer that he had better work at art for a
living.

There is plenty in all this to rattle the boys and make them believe there is
an easy way to fame and fortune, such as Homer had found or strayed into. But
the dear school of experience is a very effective teacher, and two years of
experimenting and cartooning has convinced most of the boys that the hill of
art is as hard to climb as the hill of science, which they abandoned to loiter
in the royal road to fame. Only here and there an art scribbler is left
punishing himself in the vain endeavor to evoke a faculty too weak for
self-assertion; very much like making something out of nothing.

The plain, unvarnished truth as respects Homer's early years would have saved
the boys from the unlucky diversion, but his interviewers were not informed
thereof. In fact, Homer himself  attached no importance to his early habits,
nor had he considered the controlling impulse which prompted them. It is
doubtful if he could have given as good a reason for himself as Topsy did,
that he "just grow'd."

The common mind everywhere takes but little account of what is most
influential in the formative period of human  character. Unless a person has
received an academic education, he says at once. "I am uneducated," and
considers as unworthy of mention the early, constant andl unaided exercise of
his mental faculties, the only true and reliable education. And it is owing to
the omission of the basic conditions, the absolutely essential antecedents,
from the biographical sketch that make of Homer an inexplicable personage.
Very creditable ac counts, however, have been written within a year by Allan
Dale, Julian Hawthorne and Arthur McEwan, but they contain no antidote to the
irrational intoxication which possessed the young, would-be artists of Oregon.
If they could have been assured for a fact that although Homer never attended
an art school or had an art teacher, he had spent his whole life in the daily
and almost hourly practice of art, not as technically understood, but of
drawing such pictures as suited his fancy, not because any one else was an
artist, or to satisfy an ambition to be an artist, for he was void of purpose,
but from an inherited endowment of special faculties, and an irrepressible
desire to exercise them, they would have dropped their pencils in utter
amazement to think of following in the track of such a being. He didn't wait
until he was 12 years old before he began to trace his mental pictures on
paper. Before he was 3 years old he was observing and drawing, rudely but
continuously, subject to such intermissions of play as children take. It is
nothing uncommon for young children to draw, but it is very rare to see one
absorbed in the work hour after hour, putting his observations to paper as
though it were a devotion.

His extraordinary love for animals, and especially of birds, was exhibited
when only a few months old. Unlike other babies, toys afforded him but little
amusement. Shaking rattle boxes and blowing whistles only fretted him, and his
wearied looks and moans seemed to say that he was already tired of existence.

Carrying him around into the various rooms and showing pictures soon became
irksome, and in quest of something to relieve the monotony of indoor life, his
paternal grandmother found a continuous solace for his fretful moods in the
chickens.

It was worth the time of a philosopher, to observe the child drink in every
motion of the fowls, and witness the thrill of joy that went through his being
when the cock crew or flapped his wings.

Such a picture is worth reproducing. Old grandmother in her easy chair upon
the veranda; baby sitting upon the floor by her side; the little hands tossing
wheat, at intervals, to the clucking hen and her brood, the latter venturing
into baby's lap and picking grains therefrom, despite the warnings of the shy
old cock and anxious mother. This lesson with all its conceivable variations
learned, ceased to be entertaining, and a broader field was needed. So grandma
or her substitute carried baby to the barnyard, and there, sitting under the
wagon shed, acquaintance was made with the other domestic animals, which
afforded him daily diversion. At first their forms and quiet attitudes were of
sufficient interest, but as these became familiar, more active exhibitions
were required, and the dog, perceiving his opportunity, turned the barnyard
into a circus of animals.

Whether this was the cause and beginning of Homer's love for dogs is probably
not material, but unlike Madame DeStael, who said "the more I see of men the
better I like dogs," he has love enough to go all around. All this seems very
commonplace. as any child would be likewise entertained, but it is a very rare
infant to whom such s-cenes and acquaintances are a necessity. And that the
forms and actions of his speechless friends were being photographed upon his
brain, was shown by the fact that as soon as he could use a pencil he began to
sketch them, very imperfect in proportions and form, but exhibiting them in
action with sufficient accuracy before long to label one as untamed, another
mad, and another frolicksome.

After his mother's death, from smallpox, as stated, the family was subjected
to several months of social isolation, during the rainy season, when Homer,
just recovered from the dread disease. was kept indoors. During these dull
months he worked more assiduously at drawing than ever since for pay. Sitting
at the desk, or lying prone upon the floor, it was draw, draw draw. Fearing
the effect of such intense application upon the slimsy fellow, his grandmother
tried various diversions, without much success. She could interest him with
Indian or ghost stories, but such gave him no bodily exercise, and only set
him to drawing "how granny looked when telling ghost stories."

(Among Homer's subjects for illustration was his father, whom he pictured in
various ways upon the fences, barn or wherever he could find a board large
enough to accommodate the scene he wished to portray. For years this habit
brought about no ideas in his father's mind of a some day future prominence
for his son, but rather a feeling of irritation at being drawn as he was, and
in ludicrous positions. As a result he put in considerable time in trying to
develop, with the aid of a branch of hazel-bush, a more matter of fact manner
of action in Homer. He had to finally give it up. however, for the latter kept
on making his cartoons, often showing “what father did when he got mad at
them.” These incidents the now justly proud parent has seemingly forgotten,
but this article would not he complete without giving them mention, so the
liberty has been taken to supply the omission. - Ed.)

Plainly observable, even thus early, was his love of the dramatic in
everything having life. Though much attracted by beautiful specimens of the
animal kingdom, his chief satisfaction came from representing them in their
moods. His pictures were all doing something. Horses, dogs, monkeys, chickens,
ducks, pigeons, were exhibiting their peculiar characteristics, and so fitted
to the occasion as to awaken the supposition that the artist must be "en
rapport" with all animated nature. Of course, his artistic creations were wide
of the mark, as respects conformity to natural p r op o r t i ons, which his
visiting critics unfailingly pointed o u t. "Homer, this horse's legs are too
long for his body; his back is too short, and his neck too long. And this dog,
chasing the horse, is too longbodied and short-legged. Nobody ever saw a dog
like that." His reply was, "that is a bench-leg dog, and the horse can't kick
him." The real excellence of the disaproportioned animals, which the voluntary
critics did not see, lay in the fact that they were truly acting out their
natures, under the circumstances, and exhibiting the same controlling animal
desires in every limb and feature.

A mad horse was mad all over, and an ardent dog showed it in every part,
regardless of proportions.

It may he said that these are a fond parent's after-thoughts, or the result of
h is own suggestions at the time, but neither of these suspicions can be true.
The suggestion as to harmony in, dramatic compositions and coordination of
details might be elaborated to a student a thousand times, and yet, without
the natural faculty to perceive, without the sympathy with nature, the
suggestions would result in a mere artificiality, as devoid of life as "a
painted ship upon a painted ocean."

Art education at can not supply an the highest schools artist's natural
deficiency in mechanical aptitude, or give him a receptive sympathy with life.

A highly accomplished Paris ian artist. working on the Examiner, saw a cartoon
by Homer, representing t h e havoc created a m o n g the animals of a barnyard
by the passing of the first railroad train through it. and remarked: "No man
who was not born in a barnyard could do that."

Evidently that artist was off in his casuistry, for he, too, had seen ducks
and geese, cows and calves, goats and sheep, horses and mules, all of them in
action, and while he could represent them in action with far more accuracy as
to proportion of parts, his animals in such a scene would be doing some very
poor acting; in fact, not looking and acting like themselves. If an early
acquaintance and continuous existence with domestic animals could make an
artist. then all farmers' boys would be artists. The poor Irish who raise pigs
and chickens in the house, and the Arabs who tent their horses and children
together from birth, should be artists. Such incidents did not make artists;
they merely furnish opportunity for the exercise of birth endowments.

And Homer's early method of work, if an impulsive employment, may be dignified
by the term method, was “sui genens,” and probably unique, if not wonderful.
Coincident with the drawing of a mad horse, was the acting by himself. The
work would be arrested at times, seemingly for want of appreciation or mental
image of a horse in that state of feeling, and then he took to the floor.
After viciously stamping, kicking, snorting and switching an improvised tail,
which he held in his hand behind his back, until his feeling or fancy became
satisfied, the picture was completed and referred to me with the question, "Is
that the way a mad horse looks?" "Yes, he appears to be mad through and
through."

Granting that the importance of harmony in a composition was frequently spoken
of in his youth, I lay no claim to being his teacher, for he was moved by an
impulse that paid but slight regard to the technical restrictions of scribe
and rule.

And although it has been said by a writer in The New York World that he "has a
robust contempt of art," his natural ability and aptitude for accomplishing
such results as the critic would call artistic are unsurpassed. The mechanical
aids and dilatory processes of the schooled artists are never resorted to by
him. He does not use a snap-shot camera, or wait for a dead-rest pose. but
sketches on the spur of the moment, and “shoots folly as it flies." Under such
circumstances, faultless art is out of the question, nor does a daily
newspaper need it.

During the Columbian exposition at Chicago in 1892, a famous horse race
occurred, and all the great newspapers sent artists to sketch the winning
horse. Homer's picture for the Chicago Herald easily surpassed all
coinpetitors. What other artist in America can study a man’s features for a
minute or two, then walk a mile to his studio and draw a better likeness of
him than was ever done by an artist having a pose?

Sam Rainy's picture was taken in this way, and he was so pleased with it that
he procured the original from the Examiner and has it framed in his office.
And still Homer makes no pretensions to serious art, as taught at the schools.
His forte is caricature, though Clara Morris says it is not, but that he is a
great actor.

He fell in love with the beautiful beasts and birds at first sight, and the
attachment continues unabated.

His fondness for dramatic scenes, first noticed in connection with them, did
not end there. Very early, even at 3 years of age, he was experimenting with
his playmates, for no observable reason, except that he desired to see them
act. People said he was a hector, a tease, and few of them discovered the
cause, as there seemed to be no connection with anger or ill will. Many a
delightful play ended in a rumpus, which he eagerly eyed, the only placid and
sweet-tempered one of the company. One woman said she believed Homer loved to
see children quarrel and ctit up. Indeed, she had come very close to the
truth, but the motive she had not divined. Likely he was probing human nature
and assimilating its moods. I do not take him to be a philosopher. His
peculiarities in this respect are referred to his mother, who was the most
consummate reproducer of social scenes. No person, however old in feature,
form, voice or gesture, was beyond her powers of imitation. And it was all so
natural that I did not call it acting. Rather, it was being. I asked her once
how she could do this, and she said, "I feel like them." I have often thought,
when seeing Homer immersed in his work, that he, too, feels like his subjects.

All through his boyhood days he was fond of pictures, and spent much time in
poring over illustrated books and papers, and in visiting art galleries, but
he was never known to copy from them. His innate desire and tendency, as well
as my advice, was to illustrate his own conceptions and fancies. His first
observations, as before narrated, were at home in his father’s barnyard, but
as he grew he began to roam in quest of something new, and when he heard of
any strange breed, or any extraordinary specimen of the animal creation, he
was at once seized with what ordinary peopIe would call an irrational desire
to see it. And to see, in his case, meant the most intense study, not for a
few minutes or an hour, but continuously, until the subject became a part of
him. Of scores of pigeons, he knew every individ ual, and discovered that the
old story of their marital faithfulness is a myth; that they have their little
jealousies and love intrigues like human beings. Of his visits over the
country, people said they were idle, purposeless; that he was sowing wild
oats, a mere pleasure-seeker but I noticed that he came to me full, not of
book learning, but of the only kind of acquisitions for which he cared, new
birds and beasts, new men and their character manifestations, as he could
prove with his ever-ready pencil.

They were as much voyages of discovery as Columbus undertook in 1492. Unlike
the great navigator, his cruisings were not for wealth or power, or the
introduction of religion to heathen lands: they had no ulterior purpose of
financial gain, for the thought had never crossed his brain that he was, in
this spontaneous and almost unconscious way, preparing himself for gainful
occupation.

But he was approaching manhood, and I occasionally remarked to him that he had
so far been acting as though life here is a holiday or a visit, when in fact
it is a very serious matter, and requires earnest effort to get a good living.
He did not dissent from my view of it, but seemed at a loss in deciding for
what he was best fitted.

We had a general merchandise store, and he had experimented enough in selling
goods to know that his mind could not be tied to the business. Customers
buying tobacco got it at their own price, and shopping women objected to his
habit of stretching elastic tape when selling it by the yard. There was fun in
such things, but no perceptible profit. He opened the store in the morning
while I was at breakfast, and took his afterwards. Upon going in one morning
and finding the floor unswept, I soon saw what had engaged his attention
during the half-hour. A magnificent carrier pigeon on the wing, and above it
in colored letters this legend: "How glorious the flight of a bird must be!"

My mind was made up : Homer is an artist or nothing; he shall fly. As a
preparatory step, he was sent to the commercial college in Portland, which was
of great advantage to him, although he spent considerable time in his lifelong
habit. The principal reported him bright, but not studious of works in the
vogue, and mildly suggested that bookkeeping by double-entry was not, as a
rule, illustrated by animals, wild or tame. Receiving a letter from me
containing a reprimand for his want of earnestness, he no doubt gave an hour
or two to retrospection, and passed in review his various attempts at the
employments which afford other men a living, and wisely regarding them as
hopeless for him, he turned to the only thing he could do, and applied for a
position on the West Shore, an illustrated monthly published in Portland. The
publisher sent him to the head artist, a Mr. Smith, who eyed the young man
rather contemptuously. 'Then you think, Mr. Davenport, that you have a natural
talent for drawing?" Mr. D -- , somewhat withered, thought he had some. "Do
you see that man across the street, leaningagainst a drygoods box? Draw him."
And the artist went down stairs and across the street to where the leaning
individual was, thinking, as he went, that one egotistical greenhorn was
effectually    disposed of. He was surprised upon his return to find the
greenhorn had finished two pictures, the leaning person and Mr Smith. Where
did you take lessons in art?" "I never took any," said Homer. Thinking there
was a misunderstanding, he asked, "What art school did you attend?" "I never
attended an art school." Mr. Smith slowly and musingly ejaculated, "Well,
young man, you are either a liar or a fool." Homer felt let down at such
abuse, but I consoled him, saying it was the only genuine compliment he had
ever received from a professional, though couched in rough language.

Shortly afterwards I said: "Homer, the fates are against us; we must separate;
here is some money, go to San Francisco, and, recollect, it is art from this
on.” We had supposed that the head of an art school would be glad to welcome a
young man with such decided predilections as Homer had shown, and be willing,
as well as able to add improvement and give discipline without attempting to
destroy his indi- viduality, but in this we were completely in error. Homer
was soon informed that his art was not art at all, but an uncouth vagary,
which must be forthwith abandoned. Henceforth he must drop his fancies and
draw by scribe and rule; everything must exist in natural, and therefore
proper proportion; expression without it is a veritable nightmare, and the boy
who would undertake to draw a figure without, in the first place, blocking it
in proportion, is a fool from whom nothing excellent can be expected. This
lesson was dinned, with so much rudeness and so continuously, that the benefit
hoped for was impracticable. Homer was too long for the teacher's Procrustean
bed, and, therefore, spent very little tine in that school. As before, the
city with it's zoological garden and heterogeneous population, became his
school, at which he was not laggard in attendance.

A siege of la grippe sent him home, and soon after he got a position on the
Portland Mercury, and worked several months for that paper, using star plates,
the abomination of all artists. While working there he was sent to New Orleans
to sketch the Dempsey-Fitzsimmons fight, and made some very clever drawings of
the combatants.

The short time he was in the South was very valuable, as it introduced him to
a new world, and one rich in that unrestrained and exhuberant abandon of the
negro race. He returned with his bead and heart full of it, and for several
days was oblivious to all surroundings, until he had put into form the queer
characters he had observed away down in Louisiana. He has never produced
anything better than the darky preacher. traveling on the train through Texas,
engaged in his pastoral work. It was equal to anything from A. F. Frost, and
with the addition of Homer's humor, which is extravagant enough for any darky,
was superb. In sanctimonious  swell, the negro divine far exceeded the
Rainsfords and Talmages of the North. Though his plug hat was somewhat
battered by long and rough usage, his cloth-es seedy and threadbare and his
patent leather shoes really spurning his ample feet, and grinning with more
teeth  than a shark, they did not prevent a lugubrious flow of religious
unction, all impossible to the thin-lipped Caucasian.

If I were inclined, like some of Homer's interviewers to distrust the force
and persistency of inherited genius, I might say that if he had not made that
picture, he would not have obtained his present place upon the New York
Journal, and the conclusion would not be as violent an assault upon human
nature as much that is written about him. That picture was an evidence of his
ability to go up much higher, and I thought  well of it that I sent it, with
some others, to C. W. Smith and William Henry Smith, our cousins living in
Chicago, who received them in the presence of the head of the art department
of the San Francisco Examiner, and by the aid of tlose gentlemen, Homer was
forthwith employed upon the great daily. B ut that was only an opportunity,
and one so hedged about with unobserving control, that his expressed desire to
begin the work to which he is hr nature best adapted was unheeded. He is a
humorist and caricaturist, but at that time Mr. Hearst was absent in Europe.
and his art manager had either not made the discovery, or was doubtful of that
sort of work being a paying investment. Being tied tip rather sternly, and his
pet yearnings often rebuked, he went to the San Francisco Chronicle, where he
was allowed more liberty, and was fairly beginning to show how the world of
huinanity looks, stretched in the line of its tendencies, when the desire to
see the World's Fair took him to Chicago.

At its close he returned to the Chronicle, and the Mid-Winter Fair coming on
soon after, he found therein an ample field for the use of his faculties, and
exercised them with but little hindrance from the kind and appreciative art
manager of that paper. At that time he was getting but $35 and when W. R.
Hearst returned from Europe and took in the situation by personal inspection,
he saw what all others, managers and artists alike, had failed to see, viz.:
That a caricaturist so affluent in imagination, so overflowing with distinctly
American humor, so fertile in artistic expedients, and withal so rapid in
execution, could be put to a higher and more extended use than merely making
people laugh. The result of Mr. Hearst's discovery was the employment of Homer
upon the Examiner at $100 a week. Everybody knows the rest. The purchase of
the New York Journal by Hearst, the transference ference of Davenport to that
paper, in which the unschooled Oregon boy has proved himself equal to the
ambition of his employer.

Anyone visiting him at his home in East Orange, N. J., will readily see that
although he is no longer a resident of the Web-foot state, in respect of
character there has been no change. He works from the small hours in the
afternoon until near midnight, at the New York Journal office, in the Tribune
building, New York city, and after breakfast in the morning he and his two
children live in his barnyard, which has a larger assortment of choice animals
than his father's had. His rest, relaxation and inspiration are with his
earliest idols. Game chickens with long pedigrees, from the parks of United
States senators and foreign noblemen, aristocratic bulldogs with immaculate
hides and no taint of cold blood, a beautiful Arab steed, Koubishan by name,
and a real child of the desert, with a grace and style worthy his lineage of a
thousand years, a Kentucky thoroughbred carriage horse, numerous parks of
native and foreign pheasants, quails from the Pacific coast, and carrier
pigeons, suggestive of the legends of his youth. To be with these and of these
is his only dissipation.

Every room in the house is ornament- ed with pictures by Nast. Remington,
Frost, besides his own pen pictures of distinguished men, odd characters by
nature, and the abnormal or excruciating shapes of humanity, the products of
social environment, religious mendicants of Rome, cockneys of London, colored
Southern gentlemen, unscrupulous political bosses and less heartless thieves.