Arts & Culture
Her Cambridge iconography made her a local icon

Photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff; Barbara Westman illustrations courtesy of Fritz Westman

Sarah Lamodi

Harvard Correspondent

September 11, 2025 8 min read

Before New Yorker covers, Barbara Westman created colorful visions of campus as Gazette’s first staff artist

On Sept. 15, 1978 — back when The Harvard Gazette still had a print edition — it was distributed as usual around campus and to the mailboxes of subscribers across the country. But something about this issue was different. In a first, the front page was illustrated.

Widener Library’s steps are immediately recognizable in the illustration, but to local readers at the time the exuberant style of the drawing would have been just as familiar. It was that of Barbara Westman, an artist with close ties to Harvard who, throughout the 1960s and ’70s, had illustrated four books about Boston and Cambridge. She became the first staff artist for the Gazette in 1977, illustrating full pages for holidays and anniversaries, half pages for charity drives and campus notices, and dozens of spot drawings depicting Harvard Yard and Harvard Square. After moving to the Big Apple in 1980 she began working for The New Yorker, ultimately drawing 17 covers and more than 100 spot illustrations over 13 years with the publication.

“Barbara was the kind of person people gravitated to,” said Fritz Westman about his aunt, who died last year at age 95. He recalls her as a stylish local celebrity in a raccoon coat and school hat zooming around in a little red Volkswagen. “She was not the conservative Bostonian. She had a method for being herself, like exclamation marks in large bubble letters. You could tell there was something about her that was just different and fun.”

Westman’s drawings for the Gazette were recently rediscovered as part of an ongoing project digitizing the publication’s physical issues. A selection of her Gazette works are published here online for the first time.

Illustration of Harvard Square in the rain, 1979.

Before joining the Gazette, Westman had worked at Harvard from 1967 to 1977 as an archaeological draftsman for the Peabody Museum. But her connection to Harvard goes back further, said her nephew.

She was born in 1929 in Boston to Frederick W. Westman, an architect, and Eleanor Proctor Furminger, a concert pianist. Buildings by her father’s firm, Whelan & Westman, can be found around Boston and Cambridge — including in Harvard Yard. The firm was employed as a subcontractor on parts of Dunster House and Lowell House, both built in 1930. She started drawing at age 2, said her nephew, and her parents’ creativity was foundational to her becoming an artist, as was a love of comic strips like “Little Orphan Annie,” “Joe Palooka,” and “Moon Mullins.” After attending Goucher College in Maryland and completing her postgraduate art studies in Munich, Westman returned to Boston in 1957 to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where she was first in her class.

Local landmarks including City Hall Plaza, Commonwealth Avenue, and the Longfellow Bridge fill the pages of Westman’s first book, “The Bean and the Scene: Drawings of Boston,” published in 1969. Her husband, the late philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, recalled the local impact of her work in an essay introducing one of her art shows: “Posters, taken from the books, were displayed in shop windows all over Cambridge and Boston, and everyone owned copies of the books.” Westman would publish six more illustrated books between 1970 and 1991, three depicting Greater Boston.

Illustration of Morgan Gate and Widener Library entrance, 1979.

Steps of Widener Library Illustration, 1978.

Illustration of Harvard Square MBTA construction, 1979.

Illustration of students in library for midyear exams, 1979.

Illustration of tourists and the John Harvard statue, 1979.

Westman (and her pet parakeet) lived in an apartment near Harvard Square while she worked for the University. Her nephew Fritz Westman would frequently visit as a child, and they would wander the Square, browsing shops like Design Research on Brattle Street, pointing out what they found most interesting. When Westman visited her nephew’s family in Rockport, Massachusetts, she’d invite him to “edit” her books. Fritz Westman said it was an excuse to spend time with him — he was then around 10 years old — and a way to see how a child reacted to her work. “It was just like having a friend who was my same age. I looked up to her; it was like walking around with a cartoon character.”

Harvard also figures prominently in Westman’s books. A 1970 Harvard Crimson review of “The Beard and the Braid: Drawings of Cambridge” observes, “When Barbara Westman says ‘Cambridge’ she is really talking about Harvard,” later adding, “Miss Westman may live in Cambridge, but she looks at it through the eyes of a tourist.” The reviewer was on to something: In a letter to a friend after living in Europe for four years, Westman wrote, “Now I look at America as a tourist sees America. I see EVERYTHING!”

Many considered the way Westman viewed the world to be one of the most compelling aspects of her art. Danto once wrote: “Barbara had created a visual myth of Boston. The world she gave was her own. In truth, her drawings were her mind, given an external embodiment.”

Barbara and her husband.

Photo by Anne Hall Elser

In 1980, Westman moved to New York City to marry Danto. Despite the change of scenery, her process remained the same. While living in Europe, Barbara drew perched on rooftops. In Boston, her nephew remembers her sitting in a snowbank in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, meticulously recording every brick of a building. And in New York, she’d people-watch on the bus or on walks along Broadway. The city was her studio space. Once she captured what she saw in notes and drawings, Westman wrote in a letter to a friend, it was then time to go home to her “second studio, where it is quiet, and think.”

In an artist’s statement from the early 2000s, Westman wrote, “I like to put the image down right away — very directly — and not change it.” For this reason, she preferred paper, ink, and acrylic over canvas.

“There were a lot of people in the contemporary art world who didn’t view her work as legitimate because it was mostly on paper,” said Fritz Westman, also an artist. And yet, “She was not somebody who was interested in trying to prove herself to the art world. When you’re making work that you love, you really don’t care about what anybody else is interested in. You just go and do your own thing.”

Barbara and her nephew, Frtiz Westman.

Photo courtesy of Fritz Westman

Westman’s work can be found in public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Harvard Art Museum; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Boston Athenaeum; Kjarvalsstaðir in Reykjavik, Iceland; and the Galerie Mantoux-Gignac in Paris. But her legacy doesn’t just survive in exhibits and the memories of loved ones — but on the very streetscapes she captured.

In the Leavitt & Peirce tobacco shop on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, a dusty copy of “The Beard and the Braid” sits on a shelf behind the register, clipped open to the page with an illustration of their storefront. And in Hillside Cleaners on nearby Brattle, an illustration of Brattle Street that Westman gifted to the store’s original owner in the late ’60s hangs framed above the front desk. Maureen German, a longtime employee at the cleaners, points out a street sign in the illustration that reads “NO NOT HERE.”

“To park in Harvard Square was a pain in the behind,” said German. “In all her paintings, when you look at them, there’s something crazy in it like that. She had quite the sense of humor.”

Westman passed that creative instinct, drive, and humor to her nephew. His early days surrounded by creatives in Rockport, and the support of his aunt and uncle later in life, gave him the push he needed to leave his undergraduate business program for museum school. Since the ’80s, he’s been a sculptor and collaborator on art restorations. Now, he hopes to share with family and friends what his aunt shared with him, and it starts at his Pennsylvania home.

“My home is like a little self-portrait. There’s Barbara’s works, there’s my works, there’s my grandfather’s things,” but, most importantly, he said, it’s becoming “a cousin to Barbara’s apartment in New York City” — a space for laughter, creativity, and the everyday sights and sounds that inspired her.

“In our very busy lives,” Barbara wrote in “The Beard and the Braid,” “we don’t stop and stare at or wonder at some really beautiful things. Artists do. Children do. I guess it’s up to artists and photographers and children to help busy people see what’s around them.”