Jacob Bates Abbott

From 1914 to 1916, Abbott attended Harvard University, where he was an editor and illustrator at the Harvard Lampoon.^[1][4]

In May 1917, he entered the Army's Officer's Training Camp at Fort Niagara and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in August of that year.^[1] He was deployed in France in 1918 as a machine gun officer with the 112th Infantry and fought at the Battle of Château-Thierry.^[1][2] Toward the end of the battle (on July 17) he was the victim of a chemical attack, following which he spent five months in a hospital; he was discharged from the Army in January 1919.^[1][5]

After leaving the Army, Abbott worked for a time as a bond broker, while illustrating on the side.^[6] He moved to California in 1929, where he worked as a cartoonist, illustrating a comic strip called The Gay Stone Age.^[6]

From the mid-1930s until his death in 1950, Abbott dedicated his artistic efforts almost exclusively to wildlife painting and illustration.^[2] In that time, he illustrated several ornithological field guides and created works for magazines and other publications, including children's books.^{[4][7][8][9][10]} One of his works was requested for a collection of wildlife paintings by the Library of Congress during his lifetime.^[2]

In the early 1930s, Abbott moved back to New England, where he became the art director of Yankee Magazine in Dublin, New Hampshire.^[4] Two of his nature paintings were later featured as covers of The Saturday Evening Post (March 23, 1935 and June 10, 1939).^[4] He also painted a cover for National Sportsman (November 1937) and a map of American state birds, trees, and flowers for Look Magazine.^[11][12]

From 1941 to 1949, Abbott worked closely with Pennsylvania Game News, a publication of the Pennsylvania Game Commission, for whom he painted cover art and drew many illustrations.^[2][13] He also created bird-identification posters that are reproduced in the pamphlet Pennsylvania Birdlife.^[14] During this time he lived in Haverford, Pennsylvania.^[2]

Abbott illustrated several ornithological field guides and a bird encyclopedia written by Leon Augustus Hausman, a professor of Zoology at Rutgers University's New Jersey College for Women: in particular, he illustrated the Field Book of Eastern Birds and Birds of Prey of Northeastern North America, and he produced over 700 illustrations for The Illustrated Encyclopedia of American Birds.^[7][8][9] American ornithologists Herbert Friedmann and Josselyn Van Tyne had generally positive reviews of his illustrations for the 1946 Field Book.^[15][16]

Abbott also illustrated the children's book Birds at Home by Marguerite Henry.^[10] A reviewer of the book in The Quarterly Review of Biology wrote that his twelve full-color plates "would make a worthy addition to any bird lover's library."^[17]

Abbott illustrated many books and other publications throughout his career. Three non-wildlife etchings by Abbott are currently held in the Princeton University Art Museum.^[18]

A folder on Abbott is kept at the Smithsonian Institution, and his papers are housed in the University of Pittsburgh Library's Archives and Special Collections.^[19][20][13]