During his lifetime Jay Franklin Booth was widely known among graphic-arts, advertising, and mass-media circles as one of the preeminent artists in pen and ink. He was admired particularly for his skill at composition, the variety of his pen work, and his capacity for imagination. Born the same year as Joseph Christian Leyendecker, within a year of fellow Hoosier Frederick Coffay Yohn, and within three years of Howard Chandler Christy and Harrison Fisher, Booth, like these other artists, reached his peak during the latter years of America's Golden Age of Illustration. Although eclipsed by names such as James Montgomery Flagg and Charles Dana Gibson, Booth's work deserves the recognition that it has gradually been receiving.

Franklin Booth was born on 8 July 1874 on a forty-acre farm in Clarksville, six miles northeast of Noblesville, Indiana. His father, John Thomas Booth, had migrated to Hamilton County, Indiana, from North Carolina soon...