Gertrude Kay (1884-1939), illustrator and landscape painter, grew up in Alliance, Ohio, where her father was a prosperous hardware merchant.
She studied illustration at the Philadelphia Museum School of Design and with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia.
Along with other women students of Howard Pyleincluding Sarah Stilwell Weber, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Violet Oakley, Alice Barber Stephens, and Katherine Pyle, Gertrude Alice Kay found success in the male-dominated world of commercial illustration.
She produced covers and story illustrations for Ladies' Home Journal and other magazines from around 1908 through the 1920s. During this time she illustrated children's books as well.
She began to travel extensively in 1921, first to China and Japan, and later to Ireland, England, and Italy. Accompanied on her travels by her school-teacher sister and mother, Kay studied Far Eastern and European cultures and filled sketchbooks with local color.
Her popularity as an illustrator increased with her foreign travels as she demonstrated her ability to accurately portray family life and, in particular, children.
In the late 1920s, she wrote and illustrated articles for the Ladies' Home Journal called “Adventures in Geography,” mainly detailed accounts of journeys to distant lands.
She painted in the American Southwest and produced colorful illustrations of Native American and Hispanic children.
Throughout her career, her use of rich colors and strong compositions fit well with her subject matter. Always a keen landscape watercolorist, she exhibited at the Art Institute in Chicago, the Plastic Club in Philadelphia, and the New York Watercolor Club.
Alice
At the back of the North Wind
Through the little green door
Through the little green door
Down Spider Web Lane
Cecily
MoonlightMermaids 1916
Cecily
Adventures in Geography
The fairy who believed in human beings.
The book of the seven wishes
Home Journal circa 1917 - 1923
Friends of Jimmy
"The Friends of Jimmy" by Gertrude Alice Kay (1926)
Adventures in my street
Down Spider Web Lane
The book of the seven wishes
Cecily
Adventures in my street
All Aboard For Wonderland, 1917
Through the Could Mountain by Florence Scott Bernard. Illustrated by Gertrude Kay
Alice and Jack use the beanstalk. "Through the Could Mountain" by Florence Scott Bernard. Illustrated by Gertrude Kay.
Adventures in Geography
Rainbow's End
"The Friends of Jimmy" by Gertrude Alice Kay (1926)
Poems of Childhood
The fairy who believed in human beings
Adventures in my street
Adventures in my street
Helping the weatherman
"The Friends of Jimmy"
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