Artwork

More than a dozen artists and illustrators—and one sculptor—frequented Pfaff’s bar. The Vault at Pfaff’s provides access to digital reproductions of works such as Sol Eytinge’s illustrations of novels by Charles Dickens, Thomas Nast’s political cartoons, Elihu Vedder’s drawings for the first edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the artwork for one of the United States’ first comic weeklies, Vanity Fair, by illustrators such as Edward Mallen and Frank Bellew. 

Scanned page images of illustrations from Vanity Fair, along with drawings by Vanity Fair artists found in the diaries of Thomas Butler Gunn, are available in a CONTENTdm viewer; these illustrations and drawings have been indexed, with metadata and abstracts searchable on the site. Other artworks have been indexed for searching and, where available, links have been provided to external websites that house digital reproductions of these images.