Michael Angelo Woolf (above, left; born 1837), worked as a cartoonist from the 1850′s, until his death on March 4th, 1899. His work appeared in nearly all of the New York City-published comic periodicals of that period, as well as the many non-comic, but still cartoon carrying, publications by Harper and Frank Leslie. He was best known, and loved, for his sympathetic depictions of New York City’s slum-children, or “waifs”. He was likely influenced in this by the work of John Leech, in Punch, and he in turn influenced R.F. Outcault (who in one of his own slum-kid cartoons, showed one of the waifs holding a book by Woolf), and Britain’s Phil May, whose first published cartoons were in the London comic weekly Pick-Me-Up, which in the same issues as May appeared, was ripping off and re-publishing American waif cartoons by Woolf.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view them in greater detail.

There were three published collections of Woolf cartoons — together reprinting just a fraction of his work. Above right, the cover of the December 1899 issue of Judge’s Library, the theme that month being Waifs. While containing the work of other cartoonists, the issue, which reprints material which had originally appeared in Judge, is dominated by Woolf. Below, the title page from that issue.

Below, another cartoon from Waifs.

Above, the cover of the rarest of the Woolf collections, 99 “Woolf’s” from Truth, published in 1896, and reprinting cartoons which had originally appeared in Truth magazine. Below, two cartoons from inside the collection.

Above and below, the cover plus a few interior cartoons, from the 1899-published Sketches of Lowly Life in a Great City. This collection reprinted cartoons from a variety of sources.

Click here, to find prior Waifs postings.

Doug Wheeler

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