The Imagination of Tony Sarg

I first learned about illustrator, animator, puppeteer and designer Tony Sarg (1880-1942) when I was at the New-York Historical Society and we mounted an exhibition on the history of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was Sarg, with assistant Bil Baird, who created charming and whimsical balloons and floats for the parade in its early days.

Sarg’s maternal grandmother was the independently wealthy English watercolorist Mary Ellen Best (1809-1891). Best’s skill as a painter and her collection of marionettes, which he inherited, inspired Sarg to become an artist himself, though his route there was somewhat convoluted. The Sargs were German; his father was a coffee dealer and a German consul in Gautemala at the time of Tony’s birth. He spent his first seven years in Guatemela, and the rest of his youth in Imperial Germany, where he attended a military academy and then served as a Lieutenant in the German army. As a young man he married and settled in London, where his career as a successful illustrator began.

When World War One broke out, Sarg finally moved with his American-born wife to the U.S., which remained neutral for most of the war. (He was 35 years old at the time, and surely conflicted about which side to serve on, if any).

Sarg opened studios in Manhattan and began publishing illustrations and caricatures in The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Vanity Fair, et al, and socializing with the likes of Robert Benchley, Ogden Nash, Jerome Kern, and Norman Rockwell. He created a series of charming animated silent films between 1921-1923. These were created for New Jersey based stop-motion pioneer Herbert M. Dawley (who also employed King Kong’sWillis O’Brien early in his career). His book Up & Down New York was published in 1926.

In the late ’20s Sarg worked creating his giant playtoys for the Macy’s Parade. His works were also highly visible in the World’s Fairs of 1933 and 1939. He continued his prolific work as an illustrator and designer until his death from a ruptured appendix in 1942.

For more on early film history please check out Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.