Ralph Fletcher Seymour

Ralph Fletcher Seymour
Photo of Ralph Fletcher Seymour (1912)
Born	(1876-03-18)March 18, 1876 Milan, Illinois
Died	January 1, 1966(1966-01-01) (aged 89) Batavia, Illinois
Nationality	American
Known for	Illustrator, author, publisher

Ralph Fletcher Seymour (March 18, 1876 – January 1, 1966) was an American artist, author, and publisher of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Though long based in Chicago, he was also noted for his work in the American Southwest; he studied, wrote about, and portrayed the Native American cultures of the region.

Seymour was born in Milan, Illinois, and studied in Cincinnati with Lewis Meakin and Vincent Nowattny, and later in Paris as well. He taught decorative illustration at the Art Institute of Chicago, and was an artist-in-residence at Knox College. He painted, and produced etchings, woodcuts and block prints. He was a noted designer of bookplates.

For a time around the turn of the twentieth century, Seymour was associated with L. Frank Baum, and worked on Baum's books By the Candelabra's Glare (1898), Father Goose: His Book (1899), and American Fairy Tales (1901). Seymour illustrated or designed a range of books, often in high-quality limited editions, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1899), John Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes (1900), John Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1901), Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry (1904), the Biblical Book of Ruth (1904), and William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1906).