John Augustus Knapp

J. Augustus Knapp (25 December 1853 - 10 March 1938) was an American artist best known for his esoteric paintings featured in Manly Palmer Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages.

Knapp was a student at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati in 1871 when his work gained the attention of The Art Review magazine, which commented that he and three of his fellow students were “prominent examples of talent which persistent effort has developed in a remarkable degree.”[1] When he was twenty-one years old, he exhibited a painting titled Uncle Sam at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition of 1874, offering it for sale at $25.

[4] In 1901, Knapp's daughter Ethel married William Behrman, who moved into their home, and the couple had three children - John D. in 1904, Marjorie in 1910, and Emily in 1917.

At some point between 1910 and 1918, Knapp met Dr. Laura Brickly, a cross-dressing eclectic doctor who had trained in John Lloyd's program.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Knapp drew dozens of illustrated typographic headers and fine pencil drawings that were printed as black and white lithographs, imagining key moments in stories published in a Christian Sunday school literary periodical produced by Standard Publishing called Uniform Lessons, including Girlhood Days and Boy Life.

Freemasonry passed down the generations – when Ethel Knapp Behrman died suddenly on Sunday 20 June 1943, her obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer recorded her membership in the Order of the Eastern Star, an initiatory organization for the wives of masons.

[5] In April 1901, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that a new edition of Etidorhpa was published, and that "illustrations by J. Augustus Knapp are peculiarly weird and striking."

On 1 January 1930, John Uri Lloyd's Felix Moses the Beloved Jew of Stringtown was published, with copious illustrations by Knapp.

[12] In April 1896, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that Knapp was going to accompany Dr. Jirah Dewey Buck to the Theosophical Convention in New York the following fortnight.

[14] Soon after the end of the Great War, the Knapps moved to Los Angeles, where Augustus worked for filmmaker Thomas H. Ince producing posters and illustrations.

He appeared in an issue of The Silver Sheet, the Ince Studios promotional brochure which was distributed to cinema owners, publicizing Hail the Woman, which was released in 1922.