Gertrude Alice Kay (1884-1939)
Class of 2026 – Artist
Gertrude Alice Kay was a children’s author and illustrator who was active during what was known as the Golden Age of Illustration.
Born on January 30, 1884, she was the second of three daughters born to Charles Young Kay (1852-1925), a lawyer and hardware merchant, and Gertrude Cantine Kay (1860 – 1935), she being named after her mother. Both of her parents were from prominent Alliance families and encouraged Gertrude to secure an arts education.
After graduating from Alliance High School in 1902, she attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and Drexel Univeristy, where she studied for several years under Howard Pyle, alongside many other prominent female illustrators of the time. She eventually graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
She returned to Alliance following her training. The family built a home at 133 South Union Avenue in 1913 and that’s where Gertrude Kay lived and worked for the rest of her life.
The home sat just north of the Alliance YMCA and later served as Myers-Israel Funeral Home until it was razed in 1996 to make room for expansion of the YMCA. Gertrude Kay’s studio was in the two-story building, which was as large as another house, in back of the property.
She called it her workshop and on the last page of one of her books, titled The Book of Seven Wishes, she placed a drawing of her studio, which she labeled “The Workshop” as well as her address. In text above it, she tells readers that her wish was for them to write her and tell her what they thought of her work.
Beginning in 1906, Gertrude regularly exhibited her work at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She began her career illustrating children’s books with Down Spider Web Lane, A Fairy Tale, written by Mary Dickerson Donahey in 1909. Kay illustrated two more books before publishing her first original children’s book in 1916, titled When the Sandman Comes.
Between 1916 and 1931, she authored and illustrated ten books, including:
- When the Sandman Comes, 1916
- The Book of Seven Wishes, 1917
- The Fairy Who Believed in Human Beings, 1918
- The Jolly Old Shadow Man, 1920
- Helping the Weatherman, 1920
- Adventures in Our Street, 1925
- The Friends of Jimmy, 1926
- Us Kids and the Circus, 1927
- Adventures in Geography, 1930
- Peter, Patter and Pixie, 1931
Her books were typically 75 pages long with five to seven full-color, full-page paintings along with line art drawings scattered throughout the pages.
Gertrude was said to have used Alliance and the people and places she knew as subjects for some of her work, especially the books like “Adventures in Our Street,” which was acclaimed by reviewers.
However, she did travel extensively through the early 1920s with her mother and one of her sisters, spending significant amounts of time in Europe and Asia, which she said was for inspiration.
This period of time had a significant influence on Kay’s art, which was later praised for its ability to accurately and sensitively portray a wide variety of cultures and ethnicities. In 1930, she collected her work from this time and published the children’s book Adventures in Geography, a 160-page work with nearly fifty full-color reproductions of Kay’s paintings that tell the story of a young boy and his uncle’s travels around the world.
In addition to creating her 10 original children’s books, Gertrude Kay is credited as the illustrator of nearly two dozen books written by other individuals. She typically contributed two-to-seven full-color paintings to each novel, in addition to painting extravagant frontispieces and she worked with many prominent authors of the time.
Perhaps the most popular was Kay’s iteration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, published in 1923.
Though she worked with more than fifteen different authors between 1909 and 1931, Kay had a particularly close relationship with journalist/author Sarah Addington, illustrating six of her ten children’s books between 1922 and 1927. Addington’s series depicting life on an imagined “Pudding Lane” was especially popular, and was known for Kay’s illustrations of fairy tale characters growing up alongside a young Santa Claus.
As early as the 1910s, she was contributing her work to periodicals for children and by the end of her career, Gertrude Kay regularly contributed illustrations for covers and features in popular magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, The American Girl, Woman’s World, and Good Housekeeping, and others.
Beginning in 1923, Gertrude created illustrated paper doll inserts for magazines like Ladies Home Journal and Pictorial Review. Her most popular characters were two children named Polly and Peter Perkins introduced in the early 1930s, who she regularly illustrated to be cut out and played with in a variety of scenarios.
Gertrude Kay’s brush was stilled on December 17, 1939, when she died from injuries she sustained in a car accident about a week earlier. She had been riding in a car driven by Hazel Purcell Rodman as the two women were on their way home from an art exhibit at the Butler Institute in Youngstown. They were struck near Canfield by another car that had crossed the center line.
Rodman, who was the wife of industrialist C.J. Rodman, namesake of Rodman Public Library, was slightly injured. However, Kay suffered a fractured skull and never recovered.
Kay never married and never had children, but her legacy was that she was a huge influence on another children’s author/illustrator from Alliance – Brinton Turkle, who won several awards in the 1960s and 1970s.
Gertrude belonged to the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors of New York, Authors’ League of America, and Plastic Club of Philadelphia.
Locally, Gertrude Kay was a member of the First Presbyterian Church, the Coterie Club, and the Alliance Woman’s Club.
She is buried in Alliance City Cemetery.