Percy Crosby's Last Masterpiece | Kings Park Psychiatric Center

Updated August 22, 2022 | By Matthew Christopher

Known as "the Rembrandt of American cartoonists", Percy Crosby was one of the most successful comic strip creators in America's history, at one point making more money on an annual basis than the President himself. His comic strip "Skippy" was the inspiration for many to follow, including Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, and he took on issues much larger than the often tame comics in papers today - ranging from subjects like melancholia and mortality, to political crusades that lambasted the Tammany Hall political machine, Al Capone, the Ku Klux Klan, and the president, to ones that fought for child labor laws, civil liberties, and freedom of the press.

Corporations who wished to use the immensely popular Skippy character began a crusade to strip the rights for his character away from him. Rosefield, the manufacturer of Skippy Peanut Butter, was using his logo and name despite court orders barring them from doing so, and allegedly contacted the IRS to start investigations into Crosby's finances, which wound up being costly both financially and psychologically. Crosby claimed he was being watched and followed, and began drinking more heavily. Nobody believed him, though with the amount of enemies he had made through vocal criticism in his comic strip, it is certainly plausible.

A segment of Percy Crosby's mural depicting patients working on Todd looms

After a fight, Crosby's wife left him and took their four children. He would never see them again. Following an alleged suicide attempt where he slashed his wrists and chest, he was committed to Kings Park State Hospital, which is where he spent the rest of his life. His daughter, Joan Crosby Tibbetts, points out in her chronicle of the story that a newspaper article mentions that the weapon was not found with Crosby, however, which is certainly unusual if true. Five days later Rosefield received the trademark for the rights to use Skippy as the name for their peanut butter.

Deemed a nuisance for trying to keep his trademark character from being exploited by companies like the one we now know for its Skippy peanut butter, and for trying to voice the same political opinions that made him such bitter enemies, Crosby was denied access to the outside world at Kings Park and his children were told he no longer wished to see them, which was a lie. Rosefield used scenes from the comic strip, its name, and even its logo to promote Skippy Peanut Butter uncontested, and decades later would successfully stop his daughter from using the name for her own line of food products. Percy spent the rest of his days preserving his sanity by continuing to create cartoons and manuscripts no one outside the walls of the hospital would ever see during his life, and when he died in 1964, alone and penniless, his family wasn't even notified. His children read of it in the newspapers a week later.

A wider view of the basement shows the poor condition of the building. Visible on Crosby's mural: patients painting, sculpting, and creating music, a nature scene on the far wall, and a circuit breaker cleverly disguised as someone taking a photograph.

Mr. Crosby's fall from grace is perhaps as extreme as they can get - like Job, his fortune and family were taken from him, leaving him only empty years to contemplate their loss. Despite his lack of access to the expensive materials he used in his heyday when his paintings were displayed in galleries in London and Rome, Crosby was able to create one last masterpiece, a work that despite its significance would be as neglected and underappreciated as the rest of his legacy - a mural that spans all four walls of one of the basement rooms in the asylum, and is quite possibly one of the most beautiful and touching insights into life on a ward that has survived.

If you look, you can see patients playing chess, working on their Todd looms, listening to music that sets them free - and the shrieking, ghoulish faces of the attendants, the suspicious warden with dozens of keys and dozens of locks. A small section has been removed for preservation but the majority of the mural was, at least when I visited in 2008, still there. While I have not been back my guess is that vandalism and time have destroyed much of it by now. Tibbetts fought Skippy Peanut Butter's attempts to silence her until her death in 2019.

Crosby's depiction, perhaps the only surviving memory of the final years of numbers of other patients, is peeling away now but still brilliantly colored, still a touching testament to a talent that refused to wither away even when everything else was gone. It shows what life was like when the ward and its patients were still alive, and it begs us not to forget.
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Photograph/Text by Matthew Christopher