Elkanah Tisdale

Elkanah Tisdale (1768 – May 1 1835) was an American engraver, miniature painter and cartoonist. He was known for the well-known cartoon "The Gerry-Mander", published in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812, which led to the coining of the term gerrymandering.

Elkanah Tisdale was born in 1768 in Lebanon, Connecticut.
His daddy ran a wagon shop in Lebanon before upsetting to New York City in 1794, and Elkanah probably worked for him as a carriage painter.
Tisdale was based in New York from 1794 to 1798, where he described himself as "Engraver and miniature painter".
After 1798 he called himself a miniature painter. Some sources tell that he met Benjamin Trott in 1798, and the two connections left New York and stayed in Albany for a few months to avoid an epidemic of yellowish-brown fever. From that become old he alternated along with Connecticut and New York City.

In 1798 he founded the Hartford Engraving Company in Hartford, Connecticut.
He allied the Graphic Co. in Hartford, an association of engravers, though he designed vignettes but did not engrave them.
He probably met and taught the forward-thinking miniaturist Anson Dickinson in the to come 1800s.
From 1813 to 1818 he worked in Boston. In 1818 he exhibited two miniatures at the New York American Academy of the Fine Arts.
He moved to Hartford in 1818.
In 1820 he was designing and engraving plates for Samuel F. Goodrich in Hartford.
He returned to Lebanon roughly speaking 1823.
His engraving of the Convention at Philadelphia appeared in an 1823 edition of A History of the United States.
He died in 1835 in Norwich, Connecticut.

Some of Tisdale's outdated works were his full-page illustrations in John Trumbull's McFingal, which was published in New York in 1795.
According to David McNeely Stauffer in his American Engravers on Copper and Steel, "Tisdale worked in both descent and stipple; but his plates possess Tiny merit ... Tisdale was a bigger designer than engraver, and he claimed to be a painter in his to the fore life, though his best put on an act was in the extraction of miniature portrait painting."

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