Esther Bruton and Helen Bruton illustrate "Bird Life at the Pole"

Bird Life at the Pole, Frontispiece

Esther and Helen, who were having increasing success with their etchings and woodcuts, decided they wanted to break into the book illustrating business. They spent the summer of 1930 in the mountains above St. Helena, California, preparing a portfolio of their work to present to publishing houses. They left sunny California to spend a bitter winter in New York at the height of the Depression. As Helen later remembered, “it was the year they were selling apples on the street there. So we trudged around, and trudged around with our portfolios and we knew the name of every art director in every publishing house… but we got tired of wearing out shoe leather.”¹ They did some drawings for magazines, but their big break came when they were hired to illustrate Bird Life at the Pole (William Morrow & Co., 1931), a satire of Richard Byrd’s expedition to the South Pole by Wolcott Gibbs, a writer for The New Yorker. Esther and Helen had only ten days to complete nine detailed drawings; the published book lists “Bruton & Bruton” as illustrators.

Bird Life at the Pole tells the story of Commander Christopher Robin (the Richard Byrd character) who leads an exhibition to the South Pole on the battleship Lizzie Borden. Unfortunately the ship makes a wrong turn and ends up at the North Pole. The Brutons’ sense of humor shines through in their drawings. The frontispiece is a picture of the Lizzie Borden being loaded with supplies as Christopher Robin sits dockside, playing a grand piano. His female companion, dressed in stilettos and a fur coat, perches on the piano as a crane lifts an enormous crate of "Elizabeth Arden Beauty Preparations" onto the ship. The hilarious drawing shows other inappropriate items being carried on board, such as golf clubs and a crate of FLIT (an insect repellent popular at the time). An illustration later in the book shows a crowd of tourists at the North Pole; the caption reads, “The explorers are embarrassed to discover that they have been anticipated by Popular Polar Tours, Inc.”

Bird Life at the Pole, p. 138

Bird Life at the Pole was widely reviewed and favorably received by the critics; the book’s irreverent sense of humor was appealing to a nation in the depths of the Depression. The Brutons' illustrations were reproduced in the Pittsburgh Press, the Daily Oklahoman, and the Los Angeles Times. The Philadelphia Inquirer called the book a “grand and clever spoof...one of the cleverest books we have encountered in many months...the illustrations well match the mood of the text.”²  The Brutons must have been especially pleased by the review in the Courier-Journal, which claimed “the illustrations are funnier than the text.”³

Helen believed that if they had persevered, they could have become professional book illustrators, but Esther “decided she would rather go hungry in San Francisco than in New York.”⁴ The sisters returned to California.  

All photos are from the book Bird Life at the Pole (William Morrow & Co., 1931).

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¹Oral history interview with Helen and Margaret Bruton, 1964 December 4. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

²Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 Feb. 1931, p. 10.

³Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), 15 Mar. 1931, p. 4.

⁴Oral history interview with Helen and Margaret Bruton, 1964 December 4. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.