Biography:

Born in Philadelphia in 1799, Edward Williams (E.W.) Clay became a prolific cartoonist of the Jacksonian era. Clay trained as a lawyer but also began working as an engraver during the course of his legal studies in the 1810s. Following his admittance to the bar in 1825, he departed for Europe to study art and began producing illustrations, covers for sheet music, portraits, and caricatures. After a few years, Clay returned to Philadelphia, where he produced his most famous and widely reproduced work, Life in Philadelphia (1828-30), a series of racist etchings mocking the supposed social and political aspirations of middle-class African Americans.
Clay worked extensively in the emerging field of lithography and from the early 1830s on produced mainly political cartoons, including many critical of Andrew Jackson. Around 1835, Clay moved from Philadelphia to New York, where he primarily designed cartoons published by other well-known printers such as H. R. Robinson and John Childs. By the early 1850s, Clay, whose eyesight was failing, largely abandoned art and printing for the legal sphere, leveraging family connections to serve as Clerk of the Court of Chancery and Clerk of the Orphan’s Court for Delaware from 1854 through 1856. He died of “pulmonary consumption” in New York on December 31, 1857, and was buried in Philadelphia