Ethel Franklin Betts

Ethel Franklin Betts Bains (September 6, 1877 – October 9, 1959) was an American illustrator primarily of children's books during the Golden Age of American Illustration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Life Early life and education

Ethel Franklin Betts was born on September 6, 1877, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest daughter of doctor Thomas Betts and housekeeper Alice Whelan. Illustrator Anna Whelan Betts was her older sister.

Betts attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before enrolling in illustrator and teacher Howard Pyle's class at Drexel Institute in 1899. Betts, accompanied by her sister Anna and mutual friend Dorothy Warren, established a studio near Pyle's after he moved to Wilmington, Delaware. Her stay in Wilmington spanned two winters, the latter of which she spent as a guest in Pyle's home.

Marriage After leaving Wilmington, Betts worked in a studio in her parents' barn until she married Edward Bains (August 2, 1874 – July 10, 1949), the executive of the hosiery manufacturing company Barger, Bains & Munn, on September 20, 1909. On July 11, 1910, she gave birth to her daughter Sarah Mellor Bains, who died at six months old from acute otitis media, a pneumonia infection of the middle ear.

Career

In the 1900s, Betts gained prominence alongside other women illustrators such as Sarah Stilwell Weber and Jessie Willcox Smith. According to Betts herself, she and her colleagues "entered the field at the time color illustration was reaching its height and came into full flower". Even with greater recognition, the works of women illustrators were still subject to both positive and negative gendered criticism.

Betts first gained work illustrating magazines, including St. Nicholas Magazine, McClure's, and Collier's. Beginning in 1904, she was commissioned to illustrate several books including, James Whitcomb Riley's The Raggedy Man, While the Heart Beats Young, and Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess. She reduced her commercial work after getting married. She continued to work as a portraitist and exhibited her portfolio , occasionally submitting illustrations to House & Garden and The Saturday Evening Post.

Betts was a member of both the Philadelphia Water Color Club (WCC) and the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she continued to exhibit through the 1920s.

Death Betts died from a cardiovascular hemorrhage in Philadelphia on October 9, 1959, at the age of eighty-two. Betts willed the bulk of her estate to the Germantown Hospital, Visiting Nurse Association, Overbrook School for the Blind and Volunteer Service to the Blind.

Selected works Illustrations