On February 1, 1901, nine artists and one advising businessman founded the Society of Illustrators in New York. The society's own history gives the founding credo as a commitment to promote illustration and hold exhibitions, while the Wikipedia article identifies the founders as Otto Henry Bacher, Frank Vincent DuMond, Henry Hutt, Albert Wenzell, Albert Sterner, Benjamin West Clinedinst, F. C. Yohn, Louis Loeb, Reginald Birch, and Henry S. Fleming. The event matters because it formalized illustration as a professional art practice during the American Golden Age of Illustration, creating a forum for exhibitions, sociability, standards, and later a museum collection for a field often treated as commercial rather than fine art.
The society helped make American illustration visible as an exhibition culture and collecting field.