Caricatures Donated to College Archives
“I just recall a man making the rounds of the fraternities and quickly drawing many of the members,” recollects Dick Debevoise, Class of 1946. We know no more than this about how and why George Pal came to Williams to draw student caricatures in 1946.
Happily two of Pal’s drawings survived and were gifted last year to the Williams College Archives. Mr. Debevoise’s portrait was received as one item within the larger donation of the Debevoise Family Papers. Several months later, the drawing of Stanton Tefft (left), Class of 1947, came as a single piece, the generous gift of his widow, Marie Elaine Tefft.
Pal’s caricatures are fascinating in the manner in which they capture aspects of the sitter. Mr. Tefft, for instance, was known as the drummer for the college’s V-12 (Navy College Training Program) Swing Band. The exuberance with which he is portrayed reflects the enthusiasm he brought later to his law career and his many varied life interests.
Pal, as it turns out, was not known for his caricatures (as artistic and entertaining as ours may be). He is, however, legendary for the science fiction films he directed and produced at Paramount. He won Academy Awards for special effects work on “The War of the Worlds” (1953) and “The Time Machine” (1960), among others. Before these live-action films—and at the time he was drawing the caricatures—he was a pioneer of stop-action animation. His Puppetoons—a term he coined from a combination of “puppet” and “cartoon”—used wooden puppets and stop-action photography to create a style of animation that Americans had never before seen.
The caricatures are only a small part of the visual holdings in the College Archives. Our collections include photographic prints, early photographic processes (daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes), lithographic and woodcut prints, drawings and paintings depicting college life and our region. You can find a small sampling of the Archives’ image collections by visiting the Williams Memory Project. – SKB
Shown is George Pal’s 1946 pastel and chalk caricature of Stanton Tefft, Class of 1947 (accession # 2012.112)