Frank Gelett Burgess (January 30, 1866 – September 18, 1951) was an American artist, art critic, poet, author and humorist.

He is best known as a writer of nonsense verse, such as "The Purple Cow," and for introducing French modern art to the United States in an essay titled "The Wild Men of Paris."

After graduation, Burgess fled conservative Boston for the livelier bohemia of San Francisco, where he worked as a draftsman for the Southern Pacific Railroad.

As The San Francisco Call noted a year before the incident, Cogswell's message, combined with his enormous image, irritated many: It is supposed to convey a lesson on temperance, as the doctor stands proudly on the pedestal, with his whiskers flung to the rippling breezes.

Four iron posts with ornate lamps at the top originally graced the corners of this gurgling example of temperance, but now they lean and lurch and pitch like a drunken quadrille.

As the Call reported, Some iconoclastic spirits, probably made bold by too freely indulging in the convivialities of New Year's day, found vent for their destructive proclivities in the small hours of the morning yesterday.

With the greatest deliberation, apparently, a rope was coiled around the mock presentment of Dr. Cogswell and with a strong pull, and all together, he was toppled from his fountain pedestal at the Junction of California and Market streets.

The magazine soon attracted an eclectic group of contributors who hung out at the Montgomery Block building, who became known as "Les Jeunes" (English: the youth).

[8] Local artists, including Ernest Peixotto, Florence Lundborg and Maynard Dixon, contributed illustrations and cover designs.

[9] By this point, Burgess had become thoroughly sick of "The Purple Cow", and wrote the following "Confession: and a Portrait Too, Upon a Background that I Rue" in The Lark, number 24 (April 1, 1897).

[12] Purporting to be composed of material written by women and rejected by other magazines, Le Petit Journal des Refusées was printed on wallpaper and cut to an irregular shape.

[13] Burgess moved to New York City, where he wrote several books and articles for magazines including The Smart Set, Collier's, and Century.

Burgess married Estelle Loomis at a Unitarian church in New York City in June 1914, and they were honeymooning in France when World War I broke out.

Leading up to 1910, one year before the scandalous group exhibiting that brought "Cubism" to the attention of the general public, Burgess wrote an influential article titled, The Wild Men of Paris.

Written after his visit to the 1910 Salon des Indépendants—the well-established anti-establishment art exhibition in Paris—the article drew from interviews with Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain, Othon Friesz, Jean Metzinger, Auguste Herbin and Béla Czóbel.

Burgess wrote of Matisse's 1907 painting Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) in humorist fashion: There were no limits to the audacity and the ugliness of the canvasses.

Burgess wrote and illustrated several children's books about the habits of strange, baldheaded, idiosyncratic childlike creatures he called the Goops.

and related essay "The Sulphitic Theory", Burgess is credited for coining the usage of the word "bromide" as a personification of a sedate, dull person who said boring things.

In his blurb for Are You a Bromide?, Burgess mentions a popular book titled Janice Meredith, which was written by Paul Leicester Ford, and published in 1899 by Dodd Mead.