The Secret Source – Beatrice Tonnesen and the Calendar Art of The Golden Age of Illustration

This Amazon Kindle format book is authored by Lois Emerson, with 135 photos and images of vintage calendar art restored for publication by Sumner Nelson. It’s currently available only in Kindle format on the Amazon store. There is a Kindle app for Windows and Mac computers, and all mobile devices. The Secret Source – Beatrice Tonnesen and the Calendar Art of The Golden Age of Illustration.

From the Introduction by Lois:

If you are a collector of those popular art prints that graced calendars and advertising items in the early 1900's, chances are you own prints by Beatrice Tonnesen (1871-1958). And you may not even know it!

That's because a signed Tonnesen is a relative rarity. Beatrice Tonnesen, an artist-photographer based in Chicago from about 1896-1930, was the artistic genius behind many of the most popular art prints of the era. Though she did, occasionally, paint from her own photos and sign the finished artwork, this was not her usual practice. Most often, her original photos were purchased by calendar publishers or advertisers, copyrighted, tinted, colored or otherwise enhanced, then published without Tonnesen's signature, or any type of acknowledgment of her work.

Even more surprisingly, some of her photographs formed the basis for art prints painted and signed by other highly successful artists of the day! Calendar artists R. Atkinson Fox (1860-1935) and Homer Nelson (dates not found) are known to have painted from her work, and other, lesser known signatures appear on popular prints that originated as photos by Tonnesen.
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There are currently 474 images in 21 albums contained in the Beatrice Tonnesen catalog. Most of them are attributable to Beatrice Tonnesen, some are questionable, and a few are for reference. Almost the entire catalog is ©Lowell Limited, LLC and available under terms of licensing.

We published a Wikipedia entry for Beatrice Tonnesen.

In an online commentary related to its March 11th print edition, the Chicago Magazine Blog “312” published a new short article about BT which has been added to the left hand column of permanent links.

Following is a reproduction and restoration of the personal scrapbook of Beatrice Tonnesen. The original is in the Oshkosh Public Museum, Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Scott Cross, archivist at the museum, was kind enough to provide access to scan the original and provided publication rights for this website.

The scrapbook is reproduced in the exact order as per the museum copy, however it is held together by a shoestring, literally. I believe that the original order was somehow not retained over the years, and obviously it doesn’t not represent a chronological progression. It has been scanned for optical character recognition, and so it is searchable for words and phrases.

I have used Scribd to host the document into this web site. The latency of presentation has varied, but it’s a big file, so give it a few extra seconds to do its work.

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