Exploring Illustration: Essays in Visual Studies
Robert Robinson’s Humor
Robert Robinson (1886-1952)[Joy Ride]Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post (January 11, 1913)
Robert Robinson’s cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post reveals his ability to entertain through humor. Tickling the funny bone is the divergence of emotion expressed by the elderly man and his wife as they speed along on a chilly winter joyride. The man is confident and in control. He is clearly the originator of the cockamamie plan [...]
Decorative Nature
John Alcorn (1935-1992)The Green CurtainIllustration for book jacket for Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green & Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980)India ink with flat color overlayEvery time I see this book jacket illustration,* I notice the image and I stop to admire its lusciousness. When I look at it, it’s almost as though I can smell its verdant growth. Despite its two-dimensional composition, it feels very 3-D [...]
Remembering
John Atherton (1900-1952)Christmas Rocking Chair, 1942Cover illustration for Fortune (December 1942)
It may seem odd to focus on a Christmas cover image from 1942 in the late spring of 2013, but what makes this cover illustration for Fortune magazine extremely timely and appropriate is that it is about traditions—about remembering. Christmas Rocking Chair was the work of illustrator and artist John Atherton, who worked in both fields throughout his career. Much [...]
Imaging a Daunting Journey
The Grapes of Wrath, 1940Advertising poster by 20th Century Fox for the movie, The Grapes of Wrath
Soon after John Steinbeck’s influential novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was first published in 1939, positive popular reaction to the story* impelled the Limited Editions Club** to publish its own version illustrated by the American Regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton. Late in the 1920s Benton had begun focusing his work on the lives and [...]
Artists Learning By Copying
Charles Stanley Reinhart (1844-1896)Americans Abroad–The Copyist in the Louvre, 1889Story illustration for “The Copyist in the Louvre” in Harper’s Weekly v. 34 (January 4, 1890): 12.Ink on illustration boardLibrary of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, CAI – Reinhart, no. 25 (C size)
There is a bit of theatre surrounding the creation of art. This phenomena is so much a part of our culture that in the 1960s and 70s such an [...]
Building a Career
Ben Shahn (1898-1969)CarpenterCover illustration for Popular Home (Late Spring 1949, Small Homes Review Issue)
Isn’t illustration about communication? Isn’t its function to transmit ideas or to create images that represent the content of the book or magazine, or to picture an idea or a point of view? The visual impact of a great cover illustration may draw readers to pick up a magazine at the newsstand—a concept that the publishers [...]
The Latest in Easter Eggs
Louis Glackens (1866–1933)The Latest in Easter Eggs. The Cubist Influence Reaches the Barnyard, 1913Cover illustration for Puck (March 19, 1913)Lithograph and watercolor on illustration boardDelawareArt Museum, Gift of Helen Farr Sloan, 1978
On February 17, 1913, the International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. The exhibition, which would become known as the Armory Show, was organized by a group of American artists and [...]
The Bookworm: Rockwell’s Tribute to Carl Spitzweg
Carl Spitzweg (1808-1885)The Bookworm, 1852Oil on canvasMuseum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Germany
This article forms a direct response to Daniel S. Palmer’s recent consideration of Romanticist influence on Norman Rockwell.* In his work, Palmer noted the artistic technique of the Rückenfigur, a term which is remarkably appropriate to Rockwell’s homage to Carl Spitzweg’s painting The Bookworm (Der Bücherwurm, 1852).** As Palmer noted, Rockwell was undoubtedly aware of Spitzweg, given that he had [...]
Remington’s Infantryman
Frederic Remington (1861-1909)Infantryman in Field Costume (The Infantryman), 1890Story illustration for “General Crook in the Indian Country” by John G. Bourke, Captain, 3rd Cavalry, U. S. A., in Century Magazine v. 41, no. 5 (March 1891)watercolor and gouache on illustration boardCollection of the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT, Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1952.16)*
Infantryman in Field Costume is an example of the artist’s observant eye and talent [...]
Women Who Read
Rosina Emmet Sherwood (1854-1948)Disgusted with life, she retired to the society of books, (October 3rd) 1888Story illustration for “The A.O.I.B.R.” by Elizabeth Eggleston Seelye in Harper’s Young People, 10 (April 16, 1889): 412.Ink on paperThe Library of Congress, Cabinet of American Illustration, CAI – Sherwood, no. 21 (A size)
We read for lots of reasons: for pleasure, leisure, learning, and to treasure. Why does it matter that artists picture women and [...]
Reading is more fun than cleaning
This illustration by Walter Beach Humphrey was at auction a few years ago as part of the dispersal of the estate of illustration collector and dealer Charles Martignette. Since there is no date information with this painting we need to use the image itself to help us place it in time.
The illustration is of a young woman in the midst of housecleaning. On the floor in the foreground are her [...]
Appropriating Art
left, Barry Blitt (b. 1958)
The Media Issue, 2010
Cover illustration for Advertising Age (September 27, 2010)
right, Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)
Freedom From Want, 1943
llustration for The Saturday Evening Post (March 6, 1943)
Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, NRACT. 1973. 022
Previously I wrote an essay about some of R. O. Blechman’s illustrations that repurposed other, older works of art to make new illustrations for contemporary audiences. Image appropriation is an old and even respected activity, especially in the [...]
Women with Drive
John Sloan (1871-1951)
[Girl driving Man in a Horse-drawn Carriage]
Illustration for “ A No’count Cuss” by Jeannette H. Walworth in The Philadelphia Inquirer (March 3, 1895): 18. A clipping of the newspaper shows that printed under the story’s title and author names, it was “From The N. Y. Evening Post”*
Picture a 19th century man and woman riding side by side in a one-horse carriage. Now, put the whip and reigns into the [...]
The Rising Tide
Winsor McCay (1867-1934)The Last Day of Manhattan, 1905Illustration published in the New York Herald (Sunday February 26, 1905): Magazine Section, p. 6.
Under the title of the above illustration and below the picture are two more sentences describing what McCay’s image illustrates:
(Above) Being some Consideration of the End of some Things as seen through The Spectrophone. [By John Kendrick Bangs (added in the printed newspaper)]
(Below)“Directly beneath us [...]
One That Didn’t Make It
As the United States began to mobilize to participate in World War I in 1917 (also known as The Great War), President Wilson issued an executive order creating an agency, the Committee on Public Information (the CPI). Lead by George Creel, this agency sought the assistance of American illustrators to help create the images that would help convince the American public that United States participation in the war was not [...]
Sympathy for the Turkey
![William Steig (1907-2003); Untitled [turkey with fortune teller], 1992; Cover illustration for The New Yorker (November 30, 1992); Ink and watercolor on paper; Norman Rockwell Museum Collection, gift of Jeanne Steig, NRM.2010.53.1.18](http://www.rockwell-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NRM.2010.53.1.18-150x150.jpg)
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what will be happening to many of the farmed and wild turkeys of American by the forth Thursday of November. But what strikes me as an interesting take on the subject is the preponderance of illustrations and cartoons that demonstrate sympathy for the turkey. William Steig’s 1992 Thanksgiving New Yorker cover watercolor illustrates the sadness a gypsy fortune teller feels over the [...]
Trying New Styles
Woman’s Day magazine emerged in 1936 as a publication with a commercial focus based on values such as homemaking, food, nutrition, physical fitness, physical attractiveness, and fashion. Similarly to McCalls, it shares traits with the other “Seven Sisters” magazines: Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Redbook. It is a magazine that revolves around idealized female roles within the domestic sphere and relies heavily on the power [...]
Referencing Lincoln
The American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), with assistance from the architect Stanford White (1853 -1906), created the large Standing Lincoln public monument in Lincoln Park, Chicago, Illinois between 1884 and 1887.* The public and critical response to the monument was effusive. In November 1887, Mrs. Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer wrote a stellar review of the work in The Century Magazine. Then in her 1893 book Art Out-of-Doors, Mrs. Van Rensselaer continued [...]
Skyscraper Construction
![Thornton Oakley (1881-1953) | [Three ironworkers on girder with steam and rooftops in background, New York City] 1904 |Unused illustration probably created for Century Magazine | Charcoal and Chinese White on paper | Cabinet of American Illustration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; gift of Jay Last](http://www.rockwell-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/3g04640r-150x150.jpg)
If asked to identify an early image focused on the construction of an American skyscraper, many of us would probably cite Lewis W. Hine’s commissioned series of photos that documented the construction of the Empire State Building begun in 1930. Most of Hine’s photos were taken in 1931 and were shot from within the iron and steel framework of the building or from a specially designed basket Hine stood in [...]
“When it Rains . . .”
While there are days when we might not welcome the rain, in spring we need and expect precipitation–as the saying goes, ‘April showers bring May flowers.’ Because this saying and others like it are ingrained in our culture, illustrators have often used these adages as inspirations from which to hang illustrations. A typical example is this Jessie Willcox Smith cover illustration for the April 1922 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.
Like [...]
Blue Willow China
Between the late teens and March 1933, Jessie Willcox Smith created nearly 200 illustrated covers for Good Housekeeping magazine.* Interestingly, from March 1920 through November 1932, she produced four Good Housekeeping cover illustrations of children doing things that included images of Chinese influenced blue and white china. In the above November 1932 cover illustration, for example, a young girl wearing an over-large red apron, stands on a folding green [...]
In the Shadow of Shakespeare
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 55
Not marble, nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.
Between 1942 and 1944, Mead Schaeffer created fifteen cover illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post picturing various aspects of the U. S. armed forces. To develop these covers, Schaeffer worked as a war correspondent for The Post visiting [...]
Yummy Art!
Lately I’ve been inundated by a variety of work that I would like to call yummy art—art that pictures edible things such as this mid 20th century illustration by Fred Eng. The illustration pictured is a group of twelve images painted on one sheet of paper. Since there was no information accompanying this object, we do not know if it was created to illustrate an article on food, a group of recipes, or signs for [...]
“Japanese fans as a matter of detail”
This young lady is a charmer.* On her lap is an open copy of the magazine the poster she adorns pitches. What a lovely dream: read this magazine and you too will coolly relax sitting on a green lawn during a long summer’s day. The young lady pictured here relaxes on a wood and cotton folding lounge chair. Her reticule (a drawstring handbag or purse) hangs from the stile (the [...]