Thomas Nast

Thomas Nast married Sarah Edwards in September 1861. The couple had five children.

While posted in Ecuador, Thomas Nast contracted yellow fever during an outbreak of the disease and died on December 7, 1902. His body was returned to the United States, where he was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.

The Thomas Nast Award was created by the Overseas Press Club in his honor and has been presented each year since 1968 to an editorial cartoonist for the "best cartoons on international affairs”.

Thomas Nast was born on September 27, 1840, in Landau, Bavarian Rheinpfalz, Germany to Appolonia and Joseph Thomas Nast. He was the couple’s last child and had one surviving sibling. His father worked as a trombonist in the Bavarian 9th regiment band.

The Nast family moved to the United States when Thomas was a little boy. He received his primary education in New York City. He did not perform well in studies but displayed an early aptitude for sketching and drawing.

Having realized early on that his true calling was to become an artist, he studied for about a year with Alfred Fredericks and Theodore Kaufmann, and then at the school of the National Academy of Design in the mid-1850s. However, he had to drop out of the academy before completing his studies as his family could no longer afford the fees.

Thomas Nast started working as a draftsman for ‘Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper’ in 1856. Eventually, he started contributing cartoons to publications and he illustrated a report exposing police corruption in ‘Harper's Weekly’ on March 19, 1859, marking the first time his drawings appeared in a newspaper.

He travelled to England in 1860 to draw sketches for the ‘New York Illustrated News’ depicting one of the major sporting events of the era, the prize fight between the American John C. Heenan and the English Thomas Sayers.

After some time he went to Italy as an artist for ‘The Illustrated London News’. He created several drawings about the Garibaldi military campaign to unify Italy which caught the attention of the American citizens. He returned to New York in September 1861.

In 1862, he joined the ‘Harper’s Weekly’ as a staff illustrator. Within a year of working there, he became popular with the readers because of his compositions that appealed to the emotions of the common man.

He gained much fame as a political cartoonist during the period of the American Civil War, and received appreciation from President Abraham Lincoln for encouraging young men to enlist in the army through his poignant images.

Thomas Nast is best remembered for his role in exposing the political corruption of the politician William Tweed and his associates who had defrauded the New York City taxpayers of millions of dollars. Tweed was a powerful man yet Nast courageously exposed his crimes and effectively led to Tweed’s fall from political power.