The modern image of Santa Claus first appeared during the Civil War. Santa sided with the North. He made his debut on the cover of Harper’s Weekly for Christmas 1862. A drawing shows a white ...

Cartoonist Thomas Nast first drew Santa Claus in January 1863, for Harper's Weekly. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1929, via Metropolitan Museum of Art under CC 1.0 ...

(WVUE) - Cartoonist Thomas Nast, more than any other single individual, seems responsible for our modern day image of Santa Claus as a fat, bearded elf. Thomas Nast's iconic 1881 image of Santa ...

Thomas Nast, “Santa Claus in Camp (from Harper’s Weekly)” (1863), wood engraving (all images courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art). These days, Santa sightings typically take place in ...

Born in 1840, Thomas Nast immigrated with his family to America from Bavaria as political refugee in 1850. ... Nast would illustrate more than 30 images of Santa Claus during his career with Harper’s ...

And Thomas Nast helped to make Santa into a symbol of that by changing his body, and you find Santa getting tubbier, and his beard grows, and he suddenly has a pipe.

A few years later, in 1879, Nast created the first known image of someone using the U.S. mail system to write to Santa Claus. In this Harper’s illustration, a youthful figure puts a letter ...

Most Americans would be surprised to learn that both political symbols – the donkey for Democrats and the elephant for Republicans – were popularized by the same maverick cartoonist: Thomas Nast.

Santa Claus and Thomas Nast. Share full article. ANTHONY LUMLEY. June 4, 1904; Credit... The New York Times Archives. See the article in its original context from June 4, 1904, Section BR, Page ...

Santa Claus is an American. This news may surprise readers who know he lives at the North Pole (where an American artist, Thomas Nast, put him in Christmas 1866) or who remember that the ...

According to the Smithsonian Magazine, Nast would illustrate more than 30 images of Santa Claus during his career with Harper’s Weekly. The most famous of these is his 1881 Merry Old Santa Claus.