A famous caricaturist hid the name of his daughter in his drawings for decades as a game.
Some caricaturists, whether in celebrity restaurants or theme parks, face customers who are less than thrilled with their portraits, but to be drawn by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was considered an honor. Hirschfeld began working with The New York Times in 1929, often drawing the stars of Broadway and Hollywood, but it wasn’t until the birth of his daughter Nina in 1945 that a now-legendary game began. In many of his drawings following her birth, for the Times and other prominent publications, Hirschfeld hid his daughter’s name “in folds of sleeves, tousled hairdos, eyebrows, wrinkles, backgrounds, shoelaces — anywhere to make it difficult, but not too difficult, to find,” Hirschfeld once said. Next to his signature, the artist included the number of times “Nina” appeared throughout the image.
This tradition inspired an unofficial puzzle for decades, as readers scanned Hirschfeld’s work to find each and every “Nina” — and this included Hirschfeld himself. According to his foundation’s website, the artist became so accustomed to adding his daughter’s name as part of his artistic process that he often had to go back through the piece and find every hidden “Nina” for himself in order to come up with the total count. Hirschfeld continued this tradition for nearly 60 years, until his death at the age of 99 in 2003.
When it comes to hiding secrets in illustrations, nothing compares to Where’s Waldo? First published in Britain in 1987 under the title Where’s Wally? (it’s still called that in the U.K.), this famous series of books follows the bespectacled and candy cane-colored Waldo through various adventures as he hides among artist Martin Handford’s amazingly detailed illustrations. “As I work my way through a picture, I add Wally when I come to what I feel is a good place to hide him,” Handford once told the publisher Scholastic. Because Waldo’s location is random in all the original 68 illustrations in Handford’s original seven books, any sort of sleuthing strategy seems impossible. Well, almost impossible. In 2015, a doctoral student named Randal Olson from Michigan State University’s High-Performance Computing Center developed a computer algorithm for locating Waldo. By performing a “kernel density estimation” on Waldo’s 68 locations, Olson developed a few simple tips. For example, Waldo never appears in the top left corner, bottom right corner, or near the edges of either page. Then, Olson developed an algorithm for scanning a typical Waldo spread, including step-by-step processes for which parts of the page to scan first. When the algorithm was put to the test, Olson says he spotted Waldo in most spreads in less than 10 seconds. However, some “outlier” illustrations took a bit longer, proving Waldo can still stump both man and machine.
