Frederick Richardson

Who was Frederick Richardson?

Frederick Richardson was an American illustrator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps best remembered for his illustrations of works by L. Frank Baum.

A native Chicagoan, Richardson studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and at the Académie Julian in Paris. He taught at the Chicago Art Institute for seven years; Albert Henry Krehbiel was one of his students. He was "a slightly-built, gray-eyed man" whose work "was strongly influenced by the Art Nouveau movement...." From 1892 on, if not earlier, Richardson made a living as a newspaper illustrator, working for the Chicago Daily News; he produced many pictures of the famous World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. His employers valued his work highly enough to send Richardson back to Paris to cover the Exposition Universelle Internationale, the world's fair of 1900. A collection of his newspaper work from the Daily News was published in 1899.

In 1903 Richardson moved to New York City to pursue book illustration. His first book was Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix, which was published serially in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1904 and 1905 and in book form in the latter year. Richardson also drew pictures for Baum's "A Kidnapped Santa Claus", which first appeared in The Delineator in December 1904. His artwork also appears in the California State Series "Third Reader"