A Flower of Venice

Signed in the corner "Sketches by G.G.W." — Grace Gebbie Wiederseim, the name she drew under before a second marriage made her Grace Drayton. A young woman turns her head toward us, dark hair swept up in the Edwardian manner, a black wrap slipping from a white blouse. Behind her the lagoon is washed in pink: a domed church, two red mooring posts, a gondola drifting off. This is the society illustrator at work, not the cartoonist. The line is quick and sure, the color laid on in thin transparent stains, the mood closer to a fashion plate than a funny page. Nothing here would tell you the same hand invented the Campbell Soup Kids. That reach — from cherub to débutante — was how a woman held steady magazine work in these years.