Howard Chandler Christy studied at the Art Students’ League in New York, then at the National Academy. He served as a combat artist during the Spanish American War, publishing his works in Harper’s Weekly, Scribner’s, and McClure’s. After the war, Christy recreated the San Juan battlefield on a hill at his Bonnie Brook studio in New Jersey, working from notes and sketches he made in the field.
But that’s not what Howard Chandler Christy is best known for today. His Christy Girls were the talk of the country as early as 1901. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch told readers, “There is a life, a dash, a naturalness about her which stamps her as Christy’s woman.” Viewers associated her with romance and weren’t “surprised to learn that she exists because of romance.”
Christy talked about fashion and the changing American woman in a 1922 interview in The Sacramento Star. He liked the new women even better than those he drew in the early 1900s.
They had improved physically and mentally, discarding their corsets and bagged hips. “The American girl has not been hurt in the least by her broader education and knowledge,” said Christy. But he excluded the flapper, saying he didn’t like her. He explained that when sweet young girls enter a room, men race toward them, and then they make flappers of them.
But what he liked most was that he had more latitude in drawing the new women than their mothers and grandmothers. “Athletics, sports of all kinds, the war, liberal education, business—everything gives her more varying phases.”
Howard Chandler Christy was published in all the major magazines and illustrated dozens of books.
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