Born in London in 1873, Crowley grew up to become a painter. Even though he studied singing in Paris and became a trained musician, his drawings and cartoons led him to New York, where he lived for around 15 years. His first work after arriving in the US in 1910 was
The Wigglemuch (published by the
New York Herald), a comic strip that has become his most famous piece. It was also the only collection of comic strip cartoons that he would ever publish. Between 1910 and 1924, many of his paintings and sketches were exhibited in New York, in both collective and individual exhibitions, including the
Armory Show in 1913 and frequent artwork displays on
57th Street. He exhibited with
Léon Bakst at the Berlin Photographic Company in New York in 1914, where his work was compared to that of
William Blake in the exhibition catalog.
The New York Times, in an article about the exhibit, remarked, regarding the comparison that "what resemblances may exist between the two artists is strongest in the spiritual quality of their attitude toward their art and a kind of personal symbolism not very clear to the uninitiated." He married
Neighborhood Playhouse founder
Alice Lewisohn in 1924, and the two of them became part of the
Carl Jung inner circle in
Zürich. Crowley was one of the first set designers for the Neighborhood Playhouse, designing sets for The Kairn of Koridwen in 1917. The New York Times mentioned the wedding, held in
London in a small item on an obituaries page, identifying Crowley only as "an English artist." The item went on to mention that "... (Alice) told none of her friends of the possibility that she might be married before she returned, but they were not surprised at the news, for she and Mr. Crowley had been close friends for several years." Nowadays, some of his relatives still reside in Zürich, conserving his personal collection of sketches, paintings, writings and personal items. His most recent exhibit, "Two Fantastic Draftsmen: Herbert Crowley and
Winsor McCay", was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in February/May 1966. This show was described in the exhibit catalog as "An exhibition of fifty-four drawings, watercolors, and political cartoons by the pre-World War II comic-strip artists who created "The Wigglemuch" and "
Little Nemo in Slumberland." In 2016, his works (many of which were unpublished) were collected in
The Temple of Silence: Forgotten Worlds of Herbert Crowley, a crowdfunded book by
Justin Duerr, published in 2019 by Beehive Books. == Works ==