Exploring Illustration: Essays in Visual Studies
Norman Rockwell and the Rückenfigur
Norman Rockwell’s Shadow Artist focuses the viewer’s gaze on a white-haired man and the novel shadow figure projected behind him. We witness this amusing scene as if seated behind three young onlookers. While we are not shown their faces, we understand that they are entertained. Accordingly, we remember our own innocent childhood fun. By putting Rockwell’s oeuvre in an art historical context, we can achieve a more complete understanding of [...]
Marching for the Vote
In the first decade of the 20th century American Suffragists paraded a lot. The archive of The New York Times has thousands of articles about various Suffragette marches and processions. Even so, the march this program chronicled was distinctive. Held in Washington, D. C., the parade of between 5,000 and 8,000 suffragettes processed with about 24 floats, 9 bands, 4 mounted brigades, 3 heralds, and 6 chariots from near the [...]
Meals on Wheels—Night Lunch Wagons in NYC
In New York City in January of 1893 the Church Temperance Society decided to abandon the various coffee houses they had been running. They instead dedicated their funds to operating a night lunch wagon that would serve hot food and beverages for working people on the street from 7:30 pm through 4:30 am. At this time restaurants closed at 8 pm so the alternative location to obtain a meal was [...]
A Man’s World
The above title, A Man’s World, typically means that men have been privileged—they might have had better pay, more prestigious jobs, or been aided in their climb by other men. But as we see in this John Falter cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post from 1947, sometimes a man’s world simply means that there is merely an absence of women. In this SEP cover there appear to be only men inhabitants of [...]
The Call of Wild Geese
Some illustrations may have more than one use. As you can see from the above information for Wyeth’s illustration of The Hunter, it was not used for its original intended purpose, but was published as a cover image the following year by different periodical and again a few years later for a third magazine. What I find most interesting is that in its final use as a cover the image [...]
Celebrating in Style
The task of composing the 1945 New Year’s cover of The Saturday Evening Post was delegated to artist Norman Rockwell. For a setting, he selected the fashionable Wedgwood Room of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City.* Having moved from its original location (now occupied by the Empire State Building), the Waldorf-Astoria had grown to become one of the most stylish hotels in America, and was the tallest structure of [...]
Santa and the Skyscraper
In 1902 the Chicago architect Daniel Burnham finished construction of the Fuller Building in New York City; it was named after the company’s founder, George A. Fuller even though Mr. Fuller died two years before the building was begun. It is located at 175 Fifth Avenue, off of 23rd Street where Fifth Avenue and Broadway cross at the far southwest corner across from Madison Square Park. It is better known as the [...]
A Frieze of Children
While perusing an interesting website recently (http://ephemerastudies.org/), I noticed this cover for a baby book designed by Jessie Willcox Smith.* The cover illustration is composed of an upper and lower image separated by lines delineating moldings above and below a series of square blocks, whose faces are marked with the alphabet sequence A through N. The lower half of the cover reveals the booklet’s title, Baby’s Red Letter Days, bracketed [...]
Turkey Day & Football
J. C. Leyendecker sometimes referenced art by others in the construction of his illustrations, especially some of those he created for the covers of The Saturday Evening Post. While this fact is not remarkable in itself, what is note-worthy is that on a number of occasions Leyendecker used sculptural monuments by the late nineteenth-century American sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, as the inspiration for his work.
The Ideal vs. The Real
In the Great Depression life was tough for most everyone and any job was a good job. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. In 1929, the recession hit in August, two months before the stock market crashed at the end of October. By the end of 1929, 3.14 percent of the American labor force was unemployed; this figure more than doubled by the end of 1930 when 8.67 percent of the labor [...]
Campfire on a Winter Lake
This week we explore an illustration of a night scene with a group of boys bundled in their winter coats standing and sitting around a blazing campfire on a frozen lake. Painted by Eugene Iverd as the cover illustration for February 21, 1931 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, Curtis Publishing calls this cover image Skater’s Bonfire, although it is listed in a recently published biographical article on the artist as [...]
“S.O.S. Means Save on Sugar” – The Campaign Against Sugar in the U.S.
The Great War (1914-1918) necessitated sacrifices from American citizens and their luxurious way of life. Commodities, such as sugar, which had once been in abundance, became the focus of rationing for the greater good. Restrictions on sugar were especially pronounced due to the removal of Germany and the West and East Indies as viable import sources.* Tactical requirements meant ships and manpower usually used to import sugar were urgently needed [...]
Which Way To Prosperity?
One of the things that causes me to feel hopeful is that we are able to laugh at ourselves in the face of difficulties. During the middle of the great depression, the magazine Country Gentleman used a work by Frank Lea called Which Way to Prosperity? for its cover illustration The image is of Uncle San standing at a cross-roads holding the sign-board for “prosperity” in his left hand and scratching his head [...]
Back to School, again
With the celebration of Labor Day this past Monday, summer officially ended. That last holiday of the summer season also marks the return to school for those children who have not already returned to their desks and studies, as we can see in Jessie Willcox Smith’s cover illustration for the October 1928 issue of Good Housekeeping. Indeed this sort of image would have been universally understood all over the United [...]
Seaside fun
Summer may be nearly over, but there is still time to enjoy playing in the waves at the beach before we head home from our summer vacations and back to school or work. That is clearly the message Clara M. Burd conveyed in her August 1922 cover illustration for the magazine Modern Priscilla. Burd chose to explore children’s summer fun in the water by depicting three young bathing beauties—all appear [...]
Billboard painters
Dohanos images tend to have a sense of humor and optimism as is evident in these two covers for The Post. On two different occasions he created images of billboard artists painting seasonal advertisements during the opposite time of the year. The February 14, 1948 Post cover portrays billboard painters dressed warmly in winter clothing and working in the snowy conditions painting a billboard that advertises a couple relaxing in [...]
Ancient History: Husbanettes?
The cover illustration for the February 20, 1913 issue of the humor magazine Life, is titled “Ancient History.” It is a single panel cartoon, drawn in the style of a Greek vase decoration, red on black. At the center of the circular illustration is the image of an older woman with grey hair dressed in a flowing Doric chiton (a single length of fabric folded, wrapped, and pinned), poking a [...]
Homes of the poor
In the middle of the summer of 1883, Harper’s Weekly chose to describe and illustrate the deplorable living and working conditions found in immigrant homes in the tenements of New York City. The front page illustration Homes of the poor was created by Bror Thure de Thulstrup to illustrate the Harper’s Weekly article, “Tenement Houses in Summer” (no author indicated).
I Want You
When World War I erupted, James Montgomery Flagg was already a well known artist. Beyond the age for military recruitment, he fulfilled his nationalistic duty by creating patriotic posters for the war effort. This famous image created by Flagg encouraged recruitment for the United States Army.
The Call of Nature
Early in the fall of 1908, Collier’s Weekly’s cover showed a man and woman walking together along a foot path. Floating in the blue and white in the sky, above the masthead are the words in caps and red ink, “The Outdoor.” Read together with the weekly’s title, the appended title tells us that this issue is about the out doors. The couple walking along the path of the cover [...]
The Tapestry of Invasion
This New Yorker cover illustration was published on July 15, 1944 to commemorate the Allied armies D-Day invasion of Normandy. It was created by Rea S. Irvin, the art editor of the magazine, who also created many of the weekly’s covers during his long tenure at the magazine. Early in the morning of June 6, 1944, the Allied forces assaulted the coast of Normandy, France in two phases: the first [...]
What Goes Around, Comes Around
In the fall of 1924, the cover of The Country Gentleman showed a bright-faced young woman dressed in her work-day apron with the sleeves of her blouse rolled up as she scrubs her wash. Her face is lifted and her mouth open; over her ears are a pair of earphones whose wires lead down by the wash tub and presumably out of the picture to their source. Her eyes are [...]
Girlish Glee*
I have not been able to discover much about Sewell Collins, the illustrator of this ‘book number’ cover for Life magazine from 1907: he lived and worked in Chicago at least during the 1890s, and as this cover illustration shows, he also did work for New York concerns. From its inception in 1883 through its acquisition by Henry Luce in 1936, Life was known as a humor and general interest [...]
Referencing Other’s Art
R. O. Blechman is known for his distinctive use of line in his illustrations. Laid down with stops and starts, Blechman’s drawn lines breathe along with the characters they create. This line style may express nervous energy or, when emboldened with watercolor wash, speak to a three-dimensional form. Blechman’s linear technique is very recognizable and he often employs it to describe familiar images that reference other, older art.*