Name/Title
Addams FamilyEntry/Object ID
0000.2514.0001Description
Creator of the Addams family, Charles Samuel Addams was an American cartoonist and illustrator who attended the University of Pennsylvania as an architecture student from 1930-31. Despite his short tenure here, his legacy remains deeply intertwined with campus life. The legendary Addams Family mansion was thought to have been inspired by the towering 1870s Gothic architecture of the first building on Penn’s West Philadelphia campus, College Hall. Addams himself wrote that the hulking building embodied the “cobwebby, gloomy Victorian structure inhabited by a vampire.”
In 1973, Charles Addams was commissioned to create this work to appear on the cover for the March edition of The Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine of the University of Pennsylvania. To accompany a feature about him entitled, “Charles the Imponderable,” Addams created an original work in vivid watercolor featuring the Addams Family -Gomez and Morticia, their children, Wednesday and Pugsley, Grandmama, Uncle Fester, and their reliable butler, Lurch. The delightfully quirky family stands in front of College Hall, whose façade of brown and yellow sandstone and greenish serpentine is partially obscured by a woefully overgrown garden. In classic Addams Family fashion, they pose as if for a traditional family portrait, each member embracing their singular eccentricity. Addams called this “a new look at College Hall” and says, “I did enjoy working on it.”Dimensions
Dimension Description
FrameHeight
27-1/4 inWidth
22 inDimension Description
SizeHeight
15 inWidth
20 in