An Old Man Had Come out of One of the Houses, from "Not Honorably Discharged" (1904): Art, History and Details

An Old Man Had Come out of One of the Houses, from "Not Honorably Discharged" (1904) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William Leroy Jacobs (American, 1869–1917).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

William Leroy Jacobs created this image for a short story by Alice French (writing under the pen name Octave Thanet), “Not Honorably Discharged,” published in Collier’s Fiction Number for May 14, 1904. Magazines like Collier’s offered new opportunities and a ready source of income for emerging and lesser-known writers and artists. In his depiction of this story inspired by contemporary life, Jacobs focused on the protagonist, an older soldier whose black coat creates a dark silhouette in the snowy landscape, highlighting both his respectability and his isolation from the other characters in the scene.

Object facts

• Title: An Old Man Had Come out of One of the Houses, from "Not Honorably Discharged"
• Date: 1904
• Creator attribution: William Leroy Jacobs (American, 1869–1917)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Black and white gouache and black chalk on paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 54.3 x 35.6 cm (21 3/8 x 14 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 20th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1917.277

Collection credit

Gift of Albert Rosenthal

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Accessions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 6 (1917): 109-11.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.