Happy Days

Happy Days is a work by John Cecil Clay, the American illustrator and writer who lived from 1875 to 1930 and who produced a substantial body of decorative illustration, book design, and occasional verse for the American magazine and book publishing world of the early twentieth century.

Clay was active in the New York illustration scene during the period when American magazine and book illustration was at a particular high point, with the major monthlies including Harper’s, Scribner’s, Century, and Saturday Evening Post all employing substantial numbers of illustrators to produce the artwork that drove substantial portions of the publications’ commercial appeal. Clay worked in the decorative Art Nouveau adjacent mode that was popular during the first decade of the twentieth century, with substantial influence from the European illustrators of the period including Aubrey Beardsley and the various Continental decorative artists.

The Happy Days work belongs to Clay’s lighter literary output, with the verse and decorative design suggested by the title. Books in this mode were produced for the substantial market in decorative gift books that American publishers cultivated during the years before the First World War. The format combined original verse or short prose with substantial decorative illustration, often hand coloured or printed in multiple colours, and was aimed at the educated leisured audience that bought such books for themselves or to give as presents on birthdays, weddings, holidays, and various other occasions that called for that kind of small literary gift.

Clay’s verse alongside his illustration tends toward the gently sentimental and occasionally humorous mode that the decorative gift book genre favoured. He was not a major poet by serious literary standards, but the combination of verse and decorative design that his books offered served their particular commercial and decorative purposes well, and the various Clay productions of the period continue to be valued by collectors interested in early twentieth century American book design and illustration.

The book is mostly of interest now to collectors of early twentieth century American illustrated books, to historians of American magazine and book illustration during the period, and to readers interested in the broader decorative arts movement of the era. It pairs naturally with the work of his contemporaries including Maxfield Parrish, the various Howard Pyle students, and the broader American Golden Age of Illustration tradition.