John Augustus Knapp

J. Augustus Knapp (25 December 1853 - 10 March 1938) was an American artist best known for his esoteric paintings featured in Manly Palmer Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages. John Augustus was the son of John Knapp and Margaret Wente, and brother to a sister, Annie, and a half-sister Louisa. He was born in Newport, Ohio.

Knapp was a student at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati in 1871 when his work gained the attention of The Art Review magazine, which commented that he and three of his fellow students were “prominent examples of talent which persistent effort has developed in a remarkable degree.”^[1] When he was twenty-one years old, he exhibited a painting titled Uncle Sam at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition of 1874, offering it for sale at $25.^[2] By 1877, Knapp had a studio at Pike's Opera House, Cincinnati. His earliest employment was at Russell Morgan Lithography (later named U.S. Playing Card), which produced theater bills and circus posters.

In 1880, Knapp married Emily Spring, and they soon had a daughter Ethel Camilla Knapp. The Knapps bought a home in Norwood, Ohio, which was then a village still in the process of being built. There they became neighbors to John Uri Lloyd, who built a house less than a mile from the Knapps, and his youngest brother, Curtis Gates Lloyd, who became a well-known mycologist.

On 13 April 1883, Knapp signed a contract with Strobridge Lithography for $45 / week, with a promise of a raise to $50 for his second year at the company - approximately $1,500 / week in today's money.^[3]

In April 1894, Knapp designed the cover and some drop-caps for a local guidebook, Norwood, her Homes, and her People - John Lloyd featured prominently in the book as the president of the Norwood Platting Commission. Knapp's name also appeared in it several times – he was recorded as a member of the Board of Health for the village, and a picture of his three-story house with a veranda wrapping the front corner was among the photographs of the homes of prominent villagers scattered through the book.^[4]

In 1901, Knapp's daughter Ethel married William Behrman, who moved into their home, and the couple had three children - John D. in 1904, Marjorie in 1910, and Emily in 1917. Decker and Dummet say that John D. remembered being taken to the circus by their grandfather, who sometimes got free tickets through his work^[5] – it seems likely that Knapp was still working for Strobridge Lithography at least into John D.’s early childhood. In 1910 Emily Knapp died from a stroke aged sixty-two.

At some point between 1910 and 1918, Knapp met Dr. Laura Brickly, a cross-dressing eclectic doctor who had trained in John Lloyd's program.^[5] They married, and by 1918, Knapp had bought a home in Pleasant Ridge, Cincinnati. He still owned the Norwood house in 1917, when it was listed in an audit of real estate values, and he was listed on the voting register at the same address in 1919, although the tight-knit Behrman family were its real residents. Knapp's daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren all still lived in the Norwood house when the 1940 census was taken.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Knapp drew dozens of illustrated typographic headers and fine pencil drawings that were printed as black and white lithographs, imagining key moments in stories published in a Christian Sunday school literary periodical produced by Standard Publishing called Uniform Lessons, including Girlhood Days and Boy Life.

In 1928, Knapp drew a series of images for a book of poetry by Kingsmill Commander called Vikings of the Stars.^[6] In 1935, Knapp designed the cover for his daughter Ethel Knapp Behrman's book of poems titled Doorways, which was published in 1936. It was his last work. Knapp died on 10 March 1938.