Joseph Hirt joseph hirt signature
Joseph Hirt Portrait not available
Joseph Hirt
(September 5, 1879 to April 18, 1943)
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Joseph Hirt was one of those singularly talented "company men" who while working for other lithographers managed to have his work signed, an honor most often reserved for top artists in a firm. Beyond that, virtually nothing was known of him before the research on this article, and even that yielded few clues on this illustrator who still managed to leave his mark on a few landmark covers, and likely on many more that remain uncredited.
Joseph was born in New York City in 1879 to German immigrant tailor Julius Hirt and his Prussian/German bride Dorothea "Dora" Rogowski. The couple had ten other children besides Joseph, including Frederick (3/11/1870) and Bertha (9/15/1872), both born in Prussia, Lena (2/1875), Adolph (1/1877), Wolfgang Julius (1880-1900),
hirt sheet music covers
Minnie (1/1883), Clara (3/10/1885), David (7/1887), and Elsie (11/21/1889). Two of the siblings did not survive to adulthood.
While no knowledge remains about Joseph's upbringing or training, by the time he was 20 in the 1900 census he listed his career as a pen and ink artist, making it likely that he had either apprenticed or taken classes at an art school. It was over the following decade that Hirt did some of his most lasting and recognizable works for at least two different lithography firms, including Teller, Dorner & Company, and several publishers. Three standouts are the highly recognizable Red Wing, a companion piece titled Sun Bird, and the less well-known but equally stunning Lucia, all of them a tour de force in multiple colors. Very few lithographers created covers of more than two colors plus black, with the exception of the A. Hoen firm who routinely turned out four color prints for composer/publisher E.T. Paull. So the Hirt works do stand out, and in some ways are equal to the Hoen covers. Another of his most widely circulated works was Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
In June 1906, Joseph was married to Adelaide Walsh in Manhattan. For the 1910 enumeration he was shown as still living with some of his siblings and his widowed mother. As it turns out, sadly, he was also widowed, Adelaide having died in March of 1908. The family had moved from lower Manhattan to near Harlem, living at 234 W. 120th Street, and Joseph was listed simply as an artist. The bulk of his cover art, which first appeared in 1901, was done between 1904 and 1911. There were perhaps over 200 completed in that time, with only a few remaining examples appearing between 1912 and 1917. Around 1912 Joseph went into commercial art, working for a few years at Universal Art Service at 1531 Broadway, doing advertising and theater posters. He also married again on November 20, 1911, this time to Florence Baumann. By 1918 he had become a manager at one of the largest New York firms, Morgan Lithography Company at 1600 Broadway. For both his September 12, 1918, draft record and the January, 1920, census, Joseph listed his address as 56 Manhattan Avenue, one block off from Central Park West at 103rd Street, indicating a positive change in fortune. However, the draft card nearest relative contact was his mother, suggesting that his second marriage had ended in divorce. Joseph had switched positions again by 1920, working now as a commercial artist in the film industry. The January 1920 showed that he was residing with his sisters Clara and Elsie.
Now no longer involved in the music business, Joseph stayed with commercial art into the early 1930s. He was married a third time around 1921 to Evelyn Ruth Bond, nearly 20 years his junior, and they had two sons, Joel Alvin (6/30/1922) and Everett Quincy (6/28/1923). In the 1930 census Joseph was listed once more as a manager for a commercial art firm. Joseph, or perhaps Evelyn, also fudged his age to the enumerator by five years in that record. As many positions in advertising evaporated during the Great Depression, Hirt, possibly either retired or downsized, switched to the canvas, and became a fairly reputable painter. Some of his oils are still in circulation in collections decades later. In the 1940 enumeration taken in Queens he listed himself as a commercial artist, even though his output in that realm had diminished. His age listed on that record was 50, a full decade off the mark. On his 1942 draft record, this time showing a somewhat more accurate birth year of 1881, he was listed as a self-employed painter having moved back to Manhattan, living at 1322 6th Avenue. Joseph Hirt died a year later of a stroke at age 63, and was interred at Pinelawn Cemetery in Queens. He was survived by his wife Evelyn and their two sons, also leaving behind an artistic legacy across several different mediums.

Article Copyright© by the author, Bill Edwards. Research notes and sources available on request at ragpiano.com - click on Bill's head.