Biography
Lorin Thompson's career illustrates the vagaries of fate in an artist's life. Successful in the 1930s as a mural artist, he was perhaps best known, at least to children, as the illustrator of Ranger Rick's Nature Magazine, which post he held for 15 years from the magazine's inception.
Thompson was born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1911. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, graduating with a degree in Painting and Decoration in 1933. The same year he married a classmate at Carnegie Tech, Edna Lorraine Walsh, also from the Pittsburgh area. The couple settled in the Pittsburgh suburb of Dormont after a honeymoon in the west.
Thompson received commissions for three Post Office murals: Altoona, PA in 1938, Pascagoula, MS in 1939, and Mercer, PA in 1940. The Pascagoula mural had an exciting history. It was restored in the 1960s, but the building in which it was placed was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The mural had been rescued, rolled up and taken to another Post Office, where it was forgotten for awhile. When it was rediscovered, it was hung in its current location, the Jackson Avenue Post Office in Pascagoula.
After the war Thompson worked as an illustrator, working on cartographic presentations and providing pictures for books such as Tennessee Ernie Ford's memoir This Is My Story - This Is My Song in 1964. In 1967 he began his best-known position. John Ashley "Ash" Brownridge had written a children's book for the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), The Adventures of Rick Raccoon a few years earlier. NWF decided to launch a children's magazine based on the book, and Thompson was hired to illustrate the magazine. He worked for NWF in this capacity from 1967 to 1982.
Thompson's lithographs, etchings and paintings have been displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Thompson died in Shelton, CT in 1997.
Critical Analysis
Thompson's preferred palette is a mixture of earth tones, primarily browns and greens. These provide a uniformity to his Post Office murals, although the subjects and the compositions differ. His two murals in Altoona pack in a lot of information, but they come across as informative, not overly busy. By contrast, his Mercer mural is a much sparser composition - and probably has greater impact as a result. The Pascagoula mural deals with a mythological subject - unlike the realism of his Pennsylvania compositions. Again there is a lot going on in this mural, but the composition holds it all together in an admirable fashion. The presentation appears to be less painterly than the other murals, but this could be a product of its restoration as much as the artist's original intent.
The Ranger Rick drawings are of course an entirely different story. Thompson does adhere to his preferred muted palette, and this works to provide characters that are energetic in the way they are drawn, but calm in the colors used to draw them. Thompson's drawings are close enough to animal sketches that they feel more alive than a cartoonish rendering would have produced. It's no surprise that these characters endured as long as they did.
Murals
- Pascagoula, Mississippi - Post Office: Legend of the Singing River
- Altoona, Pennsylvania - Post Office: Growth of the Road
- Altoona, Pennsylvania - Post Office: Pioneers of Altoona
- Mercer, Pennsylvania - Post Office: Clearing the Land
References
- Character Images - Lorin Thompson's Work (The Ranger Rick Raccoon Archive).
- Class of 1933 (E-Yearbook). Lists Thompson's graduating class and major.
- Interview with the Thompsons (Classic Ranger Rick).
- Lorin Hartwell Thompson (Ancestry).
- Joanne Anderson, Singing River Indians 1939 mural returns to Pascagoula post office, Gulf Live July 11 (2010).