Hershfield

Leo Hershfield (1904-1979)

“The Dean of Courtroom Artists” 

Born in Knoxville, TN, son of immigrant parents, Isadore and Ida Hershfield from Kiev, Ukraine, Hershfield graduated from Chattanooga High School and decided to pursue his artistic interest by going to New York City to attend the National Academy of Design and joined the Art Student's League.

In the early ‘20’s he worked as a “morgue” (research) worker for “The New York World”. While working, he attended art school for several years. To broaden his experience, he signed on as crew member on "The America", a freighter to Europe, where he expanded his style sketching and painting throughout Europe.

He returned to Chattanooga, where he worked as a reporter and photographer for “The Chattanooga Times”, which was a subsidiary of “The New York Times”, owned by the Adolph Ochs family. New York City drew him back in the late 20’s where he worked for “The New York Times” as an illustrator of the New York theatrical scene. His caricatures of famous actors and opera stars like John Barrymore, and Lawrence Tibbet appeared weekly. He worked for the Times for 11 years, until 1940, when he became the art director for “PM”, a unique tabloid daily newspaper.

During this time in New York, he met and married Mary Emma Hurst from New Bern, NC. Mary Emma was a model and “Roxyette”, the forerunner of the Radio City Rockettes. During WWII, they moved to the Washington, DC area where he worked for the Office of War Information (OWI) as an art director creating pamphlets and posters for the war effort.

After the War, he decided to become a free lance artist, working for himself for the first time. Over his career, Hershfield produced thousands of illustrations and cartoons for “The Saturday Evening Post”, “Reader’s Digest”, Kiplinger’s “Changing Times” and many other magazines and newspapers. He illustrated 55 books, many for humorist H. Allen Smith and some by Groucho Marx, Richard Armour and Vincent Price.

He lived in Alexandria, VA and had a friend, Lefferts “Mac” MacClelland, producer for NBC’s evening news show "The John Cameron Swayze Camel News Caravan" (which would later become the “Huntley-Brinkley Report”). MacClelland was asked by one of NBC’s young reporter at the time, David Brinkley, if he knew someone who could capture the important courtroom events which all the networks were missing since the Supreme Court had banned TV cameras. MacClelland asked Hershfield which began 25 years of documenting momentous judicial and congressional dramas. Hershfield's first assignment was the congressional censure of Senator Joe McCarthy in 1951.

After he moved to Bradenton, FL in 1958, NBC flew him all over the country to cover famous trials such as the “Chicago Seven”, "Harrisburg 7", Jack Ruby, Clay Shaw, Arthur Bremer, Dr. Spock, “Gainesville 8”, Billie Sol Estes as well as the Calley/Medina trials after the Vietnam War. Over his lifetime, his courtroom sketches appeared on over 100 nightly segments on NBC.

The age of courtroom art tapered off in the late 1970’s when the Florida Supreme Court ruled cameras could be allowed back into courtroom. Hershfield continued to illustrate books, articles for the "St. Petersburg Times" spending any spare time sailing his beloved sailboat from his home on the Manatee River and documenting Florida through his watercolors. He was an ardent environmentalist, illustrating articles in newspapers and magazines trying to save Florida's wetlands against industrial development. WEDU, the local PBS affiliate interviewed him and aired a documentary about his unique career shortly before his death in 1979.

Although other talented artists began covering courts for other networks and media, Hershfield is widely acknowledged as “The Dean of Courtroom Artists” who started the era. A retrospective of his quarter century of courtroom sketches was held at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC in 1980.