Ralph Barton, American cartoonist and caricaturist, produced a body of work that epitomises American high life in the 1920s. Barton was involved with the New Yorker from its inception, making eighty-five drawings in one week alone at the end of 1924. Noted particularly for his group drawings - such as, to take but one example, that of 128 Hollywood figures at the Cocoanut [sic] Grove - he worked for Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, the New York Herald Tribune and Life magazine amongst others, earning more than any other illustrator of his day. He illustrated Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and its successor, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. A representative handful of his portrait subjects comprises Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, Picasso, Lillian Gish and George Gershwin. Cursed with manic depression, married and divorced four times, Barton shot himself in his Manhattan penthouse at the age of thirty-nine. Soon, he was virtually forgotten. In an essay about Barton in the New Yorker, later republished in the collection Just Looking, John Updike wrote that 'Barton's caricatures are not indignant, like Daumier's, or frenzied, like Gerald Scarfe's, they are decoratively descriptive.' A biography by Bruce Kellner, The Last Dandy, was published in 1991 with a foreword by Updike. Bruce Kellner donated Barton's sensational theatre curtain of 1922, depicting an audience of 139 fashionable first-nighters, to the National Portrait Gallery, Washington.
