WILD ART MYSTERY
By Chris Wadsworth
You’ve probably never heard of Joseph Michael Gleeson – but a hundred or so years ago, he achieved a fair amount of fame for his artwork.
And for a time, Gleeson lived here in Ashburn in a cottage on the banks of the Goose Creek. It’s also where he died.
We went on a deep dive trying to find out more about this local man, but, sadly, a century later, details are few and far between.
Our first stop was Wikipedia, the only sometimes reliable online encyclopedia. As it states, we can confirm that he was an American painter and illustrator. We can also report that he did indeed illustrate one of the early editions of the book “Just So Stories” by the famed English author Rudyard Kipling. He also reportedly did illustrations for Kipling’s most famous work, “The Jungle Book.”
In a letter from 1912 that Kipling wrote to his U.S. publisher Frank Doubleday about the latest version of “Just So Stories,” he stated: “I thought Gleeson’s illustrations were good when I saw them in proof, but in the book, they look even better.” (This quote came from “The Letters of Rudyard Kipling Vol. 4” – which tells us Kipling wrote a lot of letters.)
This led us to reach out to the Kipling Society in Great Britain. They didn’t have much on the artist, but shared that Gleeson was born in Massachusetts in 1861 and trained as an “animalier artist” in Munich, Germany, in the 1880s. We had to look up the word “animalier,” and indeed it’s an old-fashioned term for an artist who specialized in depicting animals in a realistic manner.
The Kipling Society also shared that Gleeson was noted for having created artwork showing a mother thylacine and her cubs at the National Zoo in Washington. The thylacine – sometimes called a Tasmanian tiger – officially went extinct when the last one died at an Australian zoo in 1936, although rumors persist that some still exist hidden in the wilds of Tasmania.
Besides his work with Kipling, Gleeson found success illustrating works for other children’s books. And it should be noted that throughout much of his career, Gleeson worked in collaboration with a number of other illustrators and artists of the day.
Sadly, Gleeson died young in 1917. His passing was marked by just a short, five-line entry in a long list of deaths in The New York Times: “Joseph M. Gleeson, beloved husband and friend of Florence Steppins [sic] Gleeson, after a lingering illness in the 56th year of his age, at his summer home in Ashburn, Va.”
We included the [sic] because his wife’s correct name was Florence Stebbins Gleeson. Even a newspaper as venerated as the Gray Lady herself can make an occasional mistake.
The team at the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg was able to locate Gleeson’s death certificate. It shows he was born on Feb. 8, 1861, and died on Sept. 21, 1917. The cause of death was listed as “interstitial nephritis” – which, according to the American Kidney Fund, is a disorder that lowers the kidneys’ ability to clean one’s blood and make urine.
Slack’s Funeral Home of Leesburg (still in business today as the Colonial Funeral Home of Leesburg) handled some portion of the arrangements, and an entry in its ledger notes that Gleeson was buried in Ashburn, but no specific cemetery was identified.
Florence Gleeson went on to publish a book of her own in the 1930s. It was called “All the Days were Antonia’s” – a fictionalized account of her childhood in Deadwood, S.D., during its pioneer days.
Mrs. Gleeson apparently continued to live at – or at least visit – the cottage on Goose Creek well into the 1940s. But like her husband’s exact burial spot, the precise location of the cottage is lost in the mists of time.