Wilhelm Busch

This 1878 photograph shows Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908) at the height of his fame, roughly a decade after Max und Moritz made him a household name across the German-speaking world. Trained as a painter, Busch found his lasting influence instead in picture-stories and humorous illustrated verse, producing a stream of works whose fusion of terse rhyme and expressive drawing shaped generations of cartoonists. A portrait belongs in this gallery because Busch is one of the first artists we can name, and picture, as a direct forebear of the modern comic: not an anonymous printmaker but a popular author whose creations crossed borders and languages. The face here is that of a man whose scheming boys would, within a generation, be reborn in American newsprint. Placing his likeness among the artifacts is a reminder that the comics' family tree has real people at its roots — and that the form's history reaches back to specific, documented figures rather than a vague folk past.