The Gallery needs more information on Artist Albertine Randall Wheelan. Her print currently hangs in the gallery.
This is all we could find on the internet:
Albertine Randall Wheelan was born in San Francisco May 27, 1863. She was the youngest of the four children of Albert Gallatin Randall of Eliot, Maine and Anne Augusta Frost Soule of Phillips, Maine. Her father died when she was very young and her family was left in constrained circumstances. At the age of sixteen, upon graduation from San Francisco Girls High School, her unusual artistic talents were quickly commercialized.
She developed a profitable business preparing name place cards for the many fashionable formal dinners then in vogue. When she had earned enough to afford tuition, she applied and was accepted to the San Francisco School of Design. Her work was encouraged by the Dean of the school, artist Virgil Williams. Mr. Williams became a mentor to the young student and was "a great artist and like a second father to me". He brought her to the attention of the Bohemian Club in San Francisco w she began to supply a steady demand for place cards, posters, and commemorative menu covers all the while keeping up with a demanding course of study at the School of Design.
She also started to do magazine illustrations for "Harper's Bazaar," "Harper's Young People," and "St. Nicholas." The artist married San Francisco businessman, Fairfax Henry Wheelan, (Harvard, 1880) in San Francisco May 18, 1887. The couple had two sons, Edgar Stow Wheelan and Fairfax Randall Wheelan. Edgar Wheelan was to become the nationally syndicated cartoonist Ed Wheelan, who created the comic strip "Minute Movies" and is given credit for helping to bring day-to-day continuity to newspaper comic pages.
Mrs. Wheelan may have been one of the earliest female cartoonists. She created and drew a daily comic strip titled "In Rabbitboro" which was in syndication 1927-1928. From 1880 to 1910, Mrs. Wheelan continued to illustrate for magazines and children's books for numerous publishers including G. Schirmer, E P Dutton, and Ernest Lister of London. In this period, she also designed a large number of personalized bookplates.
