Franklin Booth - Holiday Decoration (detail)

Leaving aside Booth's masterful composition and the intricacy of his pen work, this illustration also presents a bit of a mystery. It, along with it's vertical companion piece of the three kings, (see published version) were created and signed separately suggesting they were done as stand alone illustrations. I haven't seen any other examples of Booth's work where multiple panels of drawings were all incorporated into a single design and signed more than once. Both,and I would assume the other original would bear this out, seem to have been designed as puzzle pieces in which to fit the cherubic figures motif that stretches horizontally across both top and bottom of the published page. White paint has been applied to mask off these areas which originally had been fairly fully rendered. I suspect the horizontal pieces are not by Booth, though the reproduction quality makes this difficult to verify. Whatever the case, they were rendered separately and the whole group was assembled in the pasteup process. When Booth received the originals back, he reworked at least this one as a finished illustration, perhaps for later publication. The obscured line work at the top has been reapplied into the form of a gothic arch. The dab of white at the bottom (it is not a random blob of paint) was inexplicably left alone as blank space. Perhaps it didn't stand out so prominently on the original white of the illustration board. This is all conjecture of course, but it makes for an intriguing backstory to an already spectacular illustration.