author
Michael Angelo Woolf
1837–1899
Best known for lively drawings of city street life, this British-born American illustrator brought humor and sympathy to scenes of poor children and working-class neighborhoods. His pictures, often called "Woolf's Waifs," helped shape late 19th-century comic and magazine illustration.
1 Audiobook
Sketches of lowly life in a great city
by Michael Angelo Woolf
About the author
Born in London in 1837 and brought to the United States as an infant, Michael Angelo Woolf built a career as an illustrator, caricaturist, and observer of everyday urban life. He studied art in Paris and Munich, then became known in America for drawings that mixed comedy with tenderness.
His specialty was the world of poor city children and crowded streets, a subject that made his work instantly recognizable to readers of magazines such as Life and Harper's Magazine. Those images were widely remembered as "Woolf's Waifs," and they gave a human face to people who were often ignored in more polished art of the time.
Woolf also published Sketches of Lowly Life in a Great City, a collection that reflects the same interest in ordinary people and the drama of city life. He died in 1899, but his work still stands out for its warmth, sharp eye, and feeling for the overlooked corners of the modern city.