Elkanah Tisdale (1768 – May 1, 1835) was an American engraver, miniature painter and

cartoonist A cartoonist is a visual artist who specializes in both drawing and writing cartoons (individual images) or comics (sequential images). Cartoonists differ from comics writers or comic book illustrators in that they produce both the literary and ...

. He was known for the famous cartoon "The Gerry-Mander", published in the ''

Boston Gazette The ''Boston Gazette'' (1719–1798) was a newspaper published in Boston, in the British North American colonies. It was a weekly newspaper established by William Brooker, who was just appointed Postmaster of Boston, with its first issue releas ...

'' on March 26, 1812, which led to the coining of the term

gerrymandering In representative democracies, gerrymandering (, originally ) is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage for a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency. The m ...

Biography

Elkanah Tisdale was born in 1768 in

Lebanon, Connecticut Lebanon is a town in New London County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 7,142 at the 2020 census. The town lies just to the northwest of Norwich, directly south of Willimantic, north of New London, and east of Hartford. The fa ...

. His father ran a wagon shop in Lebanon before moving to New York City in 1794, and Elkanah probably worked for him as a carriage painter. Tisdale was based in New York from 1794 to 1798, where he described himself as "Engraver and miniature painter". After 1798 he called himself a miniature painter. Some sources say that he met

Benjamin Trott Benjamin Trott (born September 22, 1977) is a co-founder (with ex-wife Mena Trott) of Six Apart, creator of Movable Type and TypePad. In November 2010, he became Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of SAY Media, a new online advertising and software co ...

in 1798, and the two friends left New York and stayed in Albany for a few months to avoid an epidemic of yellow fever. From that time he alternated between Connecticut and New York City. In 1798 he founded the Hartford Engraving Company in

Hartford, Connecticut Hartford is the capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford metropolitan area. Census estimates since t ...

. He joined the Graphic Co. in Hartford, an association of engravers, though he designed vignettes but did not engrave them. He probably met and taught the future miniaturist Anson Dickinson in the early 1800s. From 1813 to 1818 he worked in Boston. In 1818 he exhibited two miniatures at the New York

American Academy of the Fine Arts The American Academy of the Fine Arts was an art institution founded in 1802 in New York City, to encourage appreciation and teaching of the classical style. It exhibited copies of classical works and encouraged artists to emulate the classical in t ...

. He moved to Hartford in 1818. In 1820 he was designing and engraving plates for Samuel F. Goodrich in Hartford. He returned to Lebanon around 1823. His engraving of the Convention at Philadelphia appeared in an 1823 edition of A History of the United States. He died in 1835 in

Norwich, Connecticut Norwich ( ) (also called "The Rose of New England") is a city in New London County, Connecticut, United States. The Yantic, Shetucket, and Quinebaug Rivers flow into the city and form its harbor, from which the Thames River flows south to Lon ...

Work

Some of Tisdale's earliest works were his full-page illustrations in

John Trumbull John Trumbull (June 6, 1756November 10, 1843) was an American artist of the early independence period, notable for his historical paintings of the American Revolutionary War, of which he was a veteran. He has been called the "Painter of the Rev ...

's ''McFingal'', which was published in New York in 1795. According to David McNeely Stauffer in his ''American Engravers on Copper and Steel'', "Tisdale worked in both line and stipple; but his plates possess little merit ... Tisdale was a better designer than engraver, and he claimed to be a painter in his early life, though his best work was in the line of miniature portrait painting."

Notes and references

Notes Citations Sources * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Tisdale, Elkanah 1768 births 1835 deaths American engravers American cartoonists 18th-century American painters 18th-century American male artists American male painters 19th-century American painters Portrait miniaturists People from Lebanon, Connecticut Artists from Connecticut Gerrymandering in the United States 19th-century American male artists