About
Best known for his Gloucester, Massachusetts fishing scenes, war convoys, and marine battle scenes, Anton Otto Fischer worked as a model and general handyman for artist Arthur Burdette Frost and worked as a member of the crew on racing yachts in Long Island Sound in New York and Connecticut. Influenced by the fame of Howard Pyle, Fischer soon left New England for Wilmington, Delaware, where he established a studio. He freelanced in “subject pictures,” – illustrations telling human interest stories that were popular in magazines.
Fischer sold his first illustrations to Harper’s Weekly, then illustrated an Everybody’s Magazine story by Jack London, for whom he would illustrate many books and magazine stories. Fischer began illustrating for The Saturday Evening Post, a relationship that would last for forty-eight years. He illustrated such stories as Kyne’s Cappy Ricks, Gilpatrick’s Glencannon, as well as serials by Kenneth Roberts and Nordoff and Hall. From 1909 to 1920, he created more than one thousand illustrations featuring women and babies, pretty girls, dogs and horses, sports, the Navy, and the sea.
Fischer painted works based on his experiences with the United States Coast Guard during World War II, which were exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and are now in the Coast Guard Academy Collection in New London, Connecticut. Other paintings are in the collections of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, and the Kendall Whaling Museum in Sharon, Massachusetts.