Exploring Illustration: Essays in Visual Studies
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.*
Grafting
Spring Farm Work—Grafting, is one of a variety of painted and illustrated images Winslow Homer created after the Civil War exploring American rural New England and upstate New York farm life: from the Veteran in a New Field, 1865 to Milking Time, 1875.
Maying
In the 1880s, when Adelia Belle Beard drew this sweet image of the May Pole Dance, how innocent the young girls looked. Also particularly handsome are the floral borders of daffodils and apple blossoms that frame the image.
Dinosaur Parade
In his Dinotopia story series, author and illustrator James Gurney has created a lost island where dinosaurs survived whatever destroyed their species in our world and where people and animals work to live in a harmonic “peaceful interdependence.” A Land Apart From Time is the first of four books Gurney created to tell the tale of this magical, beautiful place. As Gurney tells it, his own work is based upon [...]
A Hungry Bear
In 1907, illustrator Philip Goodwin created a painting for the Cream of Wheat Company advertising their breakfast cereal. A Bear Chance depicts a large ravenous brown bear seated in a snowy clearing of a pine forest devouring a crate full of the healthy Cream of Wheat cereal. In the foreground of the painting, the artist depicts the bear tracks in the snow reflecting the bear’s intentional pursuit of the cereal [...]
The Child, a calendar
Artists Elizabeth Shippen Green and Jessie Willcox Smith met while studying illustration art with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia. Both had extensive art training before their classes with Pyle and were already selling illustrations to the popular press.
April Fool
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)|{i}April Fool: Checkers{/i}, 1943|Cover illustration for {i}The Saturday Evening Post{/i} (April 3, 1943)|Original art is in a private collection.
With this 1943 April Fool cover illustration for the Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell explored the visually incongruous as a way to produce a cover appropriate to celebrate April 1st.
Illustrating an Artist-type
Caption: Mr. Turps (who is doing a little job of painting in the studio). “Yes, sir: us painters has a many things to complain of. What with these ‘ere trusts raisin’ the price of ile [oil] on us, and the difficulties of gettin’ our money when our jobs is done, we don’t have too easy a time of it.”
Gibson Girl and Chambers Girl
Charles Dana Gibson’s images of America, especially American women, from the 1890s through 1910, defined the age contemporaneously and retrospectively. Her poise, . . . . is one of 56 drawn illustrations Gibson created for Robert W. Chambers’ 1911 novel, The Common Law. The story chronicles the tribulations of a young woman, Valerie West (the young lady pictured at the middle left of the above scene), who was left penniless [...]
An Atlantic Adventure
Ralph Pallen Coleman was a native of Philadelphia and a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art (then part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and now an independent university called The University of the Arts). His first published illustration appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1915. He went on to illustrate many more magazines and books including this image for a transatlantic story in Cosmopolitan magazine.
Mystery on the Snow
The strong, tanned, clean-shaven countenance doing battle in the snow is Doc Savage, whose bronze skin, golden eyes and bronze hair were the reason for the appellation, “Man of Bronze.”
“Our War Eagles”
Contact and Bombing were painted by Frank E. Schoonover as part of a series of four illustrations focused on the activities of American aviators and their ground crews published in the Red Cross Magazine during World War One (also known as The Great War and The War to End All Wars.)
God’s Trombones: Judgment Day
Standing with one foot on a mountain and one in the middle of the sea, the angel Gabriel sounds his silver trumpet, signaling the end of the world. Mankind’s saved raise their hands to be received into heaven while sinners are thrown into the fiery mouth of hell. This illustration was created by Aaron Douglas to illuminate one of poet, writer, musician, politician, educator and political activist James Weldon Johnson’s (1871-1938) [...]
The Blue Hour
I’m beginning this post with a request, please help me find where this illustration was published and for what story it was created. I’ve already benefited from assistance from a variety of collectors and enthusiasts in this search, but we’ve had no success. If someone can find the citation for this image, I will re-address it in a second post. Without a text to go with this anachronistic Tom Lovell [...]
Italian Gardens, 1904
In 1902, Century magazine asked Edith Wharton (1862-1937) to write a series of articles about Italian villas and their gardens. To that end, Wharton visited some fifty villas traveling around Rome, Florence, Siena, Genoa, in Lombardy and the Veneto. Many were closed to the public. Maxfield Parrish was commissioned to create 26 color illustrations to accompany the articles; subsequently the publisher turned the work into a popular book that cost [...]
Refugees from The Marne
After 1906, the American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) spent most of her time living in Paris. During World War I, Wharton made visits to military hospitals and the front lines, writing reports of her experiences for American newspapers. After the war she created her 1918 novella The Marne, a story of a young American boy who witnessed the refugees fleeing from the first battle of the Marne, through his own unexpected [...]
Just Issued
In 1897 poster art was all the rage. Developed in the 1880s by the French artist and lithographer Jules Chéret (1836-1933), posters were art created in the service of advertising.* By 1892 the Century Magazine published the first American article on the new poster phenomena and Harper and Brothers hired the young illustrator Edward Penfield to produce original posters announcing the arrival of each new issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine. [...]
Statue of Liberty
![Brewer3[1]](http://www.rockwell-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Brewer31-150x150.jpg "Brewer3[1]")
Edward Brewer was a Minneapolis born artist who trained first with his painter father, Nicholas Richard Brewer, and then in New York at the Art Students’ League taking the illustration class with Walter Appleton Clark.* In 1905, Brewer was in Minnesota to marry and returned to New York with his bride. While his commissions were slow in coming, he began to do illustrations for Abercrombie and Fitch and to receive [...]
Beginnings
Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935)|{i}New Year’s Baby{/i}, 1910|Cover illustration for {i}Good Housekeeping{/i} (January 1925)|watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and colored pencil on board|Thanks to American Illustrators Gallery, NYC
J. C. Leyendecker may be known for his yearly contributions to Saturday Evening Post covers of a baby heralding the new year, but others too have used the image of a baby for the same purpose.* One of the most charming is Jessie Willcox Smith’s cover [...]