EASEL BY THE DECADE: 1930-1939

I'VE always been captivated by books and magazines that depict artists, or their models and tools, on their covers and interiors. I suppose I'm drawn to the stark romanticism of these scenes, but I also know it's a form of wistfulness based on my regret for not fulfilling a desire to become a professional illustrator when I was young and making career choices.

I've been collecting these types of images for a long time and now have amassed so many examples of this enchanting sub-genre that I thought it would be fun to feature them in a series of posts based on their publishing chronology. 

 

So here's the inaugural one, representing the great decade of the 1930's:

 

Imagine Russell Haviland Tandy in his studio in the year 1930. He gets a call from his friend, the juvenile series publisher Edward Stratemeyer. "I'm sending over a new girl for you to paint. You'll love her. She's marvelous!" he proclaims, practically gushing over the phone. Soon, a knock at the door, and in walks... Nancy Drew.

The Girl in the Flat Top; or, The Daughter of an Artist was published by Cupples & Leon of New York in 1930. May Hollis Barton is a house name, used on 15 juvenile titles. The actual author is not known. The dustjacket scene though could be a fanciful re-creation of the day Tandy was given the Nancy Drew assignment. Both the The Girl in the Flat Top and The Secret of the Old Clock were painted in the same year, and in actuality, with the same model: Grace Horton, a member of the once-famous Horton Ice Cream family. In truth, Tandy had already been painting Grace's sophisticated image on previous Barton books, so apparently, she was the perfect choice to be become the world's most famous teenager. 

 

Publisher Ward, Lock & Company, Ltd., of London employed a dozen or more of the same artists from the 1920's through the 1960's, but so far I haven't been able to determine which one of them, in 1930, painted this dustjacket illustration.

Bertha M. Clay was the pen-name of prolific English author Charlotte Mary Brame, who wrote approximately 130 romantic novels during her all too brief lifetime. After her death in 1884 at the age of 48, her publisher continued to use her pen-name as a house name and ran off approximately three hundred more titles, making Bertha M. Clay perhaps the most widely read British author in the United States at the turn of the 20th Century. Married for her Beauty, or a Bitter Atonement appears to have been published first in 1876, and then reissued by Ward, Lock & Co., in 1930.

Painting probably came naturally to Oscar Greiner (1900-1976); both his father and his sister were commercial artists too. Greiner tended to specialize in cover art for the "saucy" pulps during their heyday, but he also produced cover art for other genres including motion-picture magazines; in fact, he was Shirley Temple's exclusive portrait artist during her famous film career. La Paree Stories was an "entertaining fiction" magazine aimed strictly at adults that ran monthly from 1930 until 1938. This issue was published in November, 1930.

John La Gatta (1894-1977) was an incredibly successful advertising and magazine artist during the Great Depression, sometimes earning as much as six figures per year, a staggering sum for the time. His specialis was beautiful women, and he cultivated some of the best looking women in modeling, sometimes painting them for years at a stretch. Fellow illustrator Frederick R. Gruger remarked that La Gatta painted "chrome-plated women." When magazines began phasing out illustration in favor of photography, La Gatta's income plummeted, so he turned to teaching and portrait painting to get by (one assumes he didn't invest his money wisely). As an art teacher he was instrumental in pushing students such as Bart Forbes, Mark English, Bob Peak and Don Shaeffer to their Hall of Fame heights. This issue of The Saturday Evening Post was published on September 9, 1933. The medium is almost certainly charcoal sprayed over with fixative and then over-painted with oil paint.

H. L. (Harry Lemon) Parkhurst (1876-1962) was a pulp magazine cover artist and comic book illustrator for much of his life, producing moody, sexy work like the kind seen on the October, 1933, issue of Complete Detective Novel. He started out like so many other artists of his ilk by working for newspapers and in advertising. Parkhurst is sometimes confused with another artist named Harry Landon Parkhurst, but the two are definitely not the same person.

Earl Kulp. Bergey (1901-1952), or Earle Bergey, as he habitually signed, was one of the most prolific illustrators of his generation, painting literally hundreds of pulp magazine and paperback covers. His early pulp work were mostly cheesecake portraiture commissioned by "entertaining fiction" magazines like Snappy, which began publication in 1912, and ran for 21 years before ending one month after this November issue came out, in December, 1933.

These two charcoal illustrations are by master illustrator and cartoonist Raeburn Van Buren (1891-1987). It was suggested that these were probably story illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post, in either 1933 or 1934, but I could not locate them in any issue surrounding those years. Van Buren, or Ray, as he was usually addressed, was a World War I veteran, and one of the industry's top freelance illustrators in his day, contributing work to a wide variety of popular publications; the New Yorker, Collier's, Esquire, Redbook, McCalls, and of course the SEP. However, he is best remembered for illustrating the syndicated newspaper cartoon Abbie an' Slats, from its inception in 1937 by cartoonist Al Capp, to its final year in 1971, when Van Buren took his retirement.

 

William T. Aldrich (1880-1966) was a noted Boston based architect, earning a degree from MIT in 1901, but he was also a prolific fine arts watercolor painter and impressionist. He was credited with producing this colorful dustjacket for Ann Bridge's contemporary romance novel Illyrian Spring, which Little, Brown of Boston published in 1935. Aldrich's paintings, always broad in subject matter, are represented at several museums, including the Whistler House Museum of Art in Lowell, MA, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA.

This glowing cover was painted by John J. Floherty, Jr. (1907-1977), who migrated to the U.S. from Ireland when he was just 20 and then began studying at the Art Students League and the Grand Central School of Art. After that he became a journalist, photographer, public relations man, art and editorial director, sailor, world traveler, paperback and hardback cover artist, and eventually an author of over 40 books for young people. During World War II he was also a combat artist at Iwo Jima and Okinawa but was barred from actual military duty because he had only one working eye, the other eye lost at age 14 in an athletic accident. 

Oxford educated Englishman James Laver (1899-1975) wrote numerous books on the history of costume as well as stage plays and at least a few novels, among them Background for Venus, which  Alfred A. Knopf published in hardcover in 1935. Laver also acted as Keeper of Prints, Drawings and Paintings for the Victoria and Albert Museum between the years 1938 and 1959.

John Newton Howitt (1885-1958) began his professional art career in 1907 after graduating from the Art Students League. He produced a significant body of work doing portraits, landscapes and advertising art, but he is best remembered today for his many magazine covers and interiors illustrations. They ran the gamut from the "shudder" pulps to the Saturday Evening Post. Howitt's "Painting A Polar Bear In Summer" was rendered in 1935, and was probably featured in a current magazine. 

All-Story Love Stories was first published in 1929, and ran weekly, then monthly, until 1957. That's a lot of issues---too many to even try and calculate. This 1935 cover is my favorite of the bunch---in fact, I like it so much that if I had a clean image of the original art I would turn it into my blog header. The cover is not signed but there's a chance it could be the work of pulp illustrator Charles D. Williams, known also as C. D. Williams.

Portrait of the Artist's Children is a novel about an artist who eschews his too-perfect wife for his model. It was published by Lothrop, Lee and Shepard Co., of Boston in 1935, who after 1940 became an almost exclusive publisher of books for children. The dustjacket art and design are the work of Clayton Rawson (1906-1971), a noted illustrator, crime writer and performance magician.

Edward Charles is a nom de plume of Englishman Edward Charles Edmond Hemsted (b. 1898, date of death unknown). He was educated at Lancing College, St. John's College, and also at Oxford and then taught at the Imperial Japanese Naval College on Jadrishar Island. As a teacher and English Professor he was often recognized for lecturing his students as if they were his own age. Charles was also a librarian and editor at Toynbee Hall (London) and was keen on poetry, especially the Romantics. During his varied career he wrote several books including Those Thoughtful People (1930), Apple Pie Bed (1931), Men Gods (1931), Sand and Blue Moss (1931), Indian Patchwork (1933), Muscara (1934), and Idle Hands (1936), but he is best remembered for writing The Sexual Impulse (1935), a highly controversial, explicitly illustrated treatise on human sexuality which was the subject of a prosecution under U.S. Obscenity Laws.

Norman Blaine Saunders (1907-1989) is considered by some to be the greatest pulp artist of all time. What he really is, is the most prolific pulp cover artist of all time. Saunders produced 867 pulp magazine covers during his career, which is purportedly the most that any one artist has ever painted. His cover art representing John L. Tiernan's crime thriller Whip of Death, the featured story in the January 1936 issue of Black Book Detective, is a colorful early example of his always vibrant style.

This cover is credited to Blaine, which of course is Norman Saunders' middle name and his most often used pseudonym. Saucy Stories, labeled Saucy Stories Digest on the contents page, published only seven issues, beginning in October, 1935, and ending in April, 1936, though they are linked thematically to the entire run of Saucy fiction magazines which began publication in 1916.

Screen Scandals consisted of just four issues and they were published in May, June, July, and August of 1936. After that the fiction-oriented magazine changed its title to French Scandals and seven more issues were published. All of the covers are amazing but the artists have never been identified that I know of (a good guess here would be Oscar Greiner, who of course produced scores of these types of covers).

Under her pseudonyms E. C. R. Lorac and Carol Carnac, Englishwoman Edith Caroline "Carol" Rivett (1894-1958), wrote an astonishing 71 crime novels in just 27 years, publishing on both sides of the Atlantic. She was also a member of the Detective Club, a London based author's organization which boasted some of the biggest names in crime writing. Rivett's books are very much sought after today by Golden Age mystery fans, and very much respected. A Pall For A Painter was published in 1936 by The Crime Club of London, an imprint of Collins. I don't know who their dustjacket artist is but kudos to them for making the painter look like Vincent Van Gogh.

Marcia Louise Snyder (1907-1976) was a New York based commercial artist and one of the first women to draw syndicated comic strips and magazine interior illustrations. She worked for Timely, Fawcett, and Fiction House, among others. This illustration was published in the April 11, 1936, issue of All-Story Love magazine, for an undisclosed story and author.

 

 

This is the November, 1936, issue of La Paree, with cover art by Earle K. Bergey.

To have or have not; A Holstein, that is. The pretty woman I already have; my wife, that is, who looks very much like the woman in this painting only with strait, auburn hair (and yes, I know, I'm very lucky indeed!).

Lawrence Wilbur, who lived and painted in New Jersey most of his life, has been hopelessly confused with being the New York based engraver/printmaker/artist Lawrence Nelson Wilbur. Even this painting was attributed to the latter, and this coming from one of the world's most reputable auction houses. But the two artists could not be any further apart when it comes to method, style and subject. Wilbur's oil painting was produced for the May 2, 1937, cover of This Week, a fact & fiction 16 page stapled magazine supplement that was part of the Sunday edition of the Philadelphia Record. Why the Holstein was inserted, or removed, perhaps, is anybody's guess.

Most teen "School Life" series books that were published in the first half of the 20th Century had illustrations on their front or spines showing kids in pursuit of a typical school activity, usually sports, or, as seen here, the Arts. Felgarth's Last Year was written by Marion Eden and published by Frederick Warne & Co., of London in 1938. The dustjacket illustrations are unsigned.

 

J. F. Campbell painted literally scores of impressive covers for publisher Ward, Lock & Co., Limited of London during the 1930's, including a ton of action-oriented paintings for use on their westerns, but Dahlia (1937), for me, is one of his best achievements. It captivates and inspires. As for Mrs. Bertha Barre Goldie, she apparently wrote dozens of successful novels in the first half of the 20th Century, and it would seem likely that with her corresponding name she was probably married to the esteemed British judge and Conservative Party politician Sir Noel Barre Goldie (1882-1964).

The names of the British and American dustjacket illustrators for Ngaio Marsh's art studio murder mystery Artists in Crime (Bles, 1938; Furman, 1938, respectively), are not known to me, but they certainly did a wonderful job in making both covers visually arresting. I can't say the same for the novel itself, which was about as exciting to read as watching paint dry.

 

John Drew (1885-1953) worked in magazine advertising before becoming a pulp cover and interior artist during the 1920's and 1930's. By the time the 1940's rolled in he had cultivated alternative commissions with publishers such as Reader's Digest, and he was also exhibiting his work regularly in New York City art galleries. Drew produced dozens of great covers for Ranch Romances, one of the longest running pulps in history (besides science-fiction), with 860 issues published over a 47 year period, beginning in 1924 and ending in 1971. This particular issue came out in September, 1938.

Somehow, in a career shortened by World War II and cancer, famed artist H. J. Ward (1909-1945) still managed to leave behind a rather hefty body of work. His lurid covers alone for a variety of pulp magazines are considered to be some of the most sensational in history, but he also drew political cartoons and painted portraits, among them the first ever full-length oil painting of the comic character Superman, in 1940. Ward eschewed photographs as source material though, preferring to paint directly from life, often using his wife Viola as a model. These issues of Spicy Detective with Ward's cover art were published in November, 1935, and October, 1938, respectively. And yes, posing on the 1938 cover is indeed the voluptuous Viola!

A few years after emigrating from Russia to the United States in 1888, Modest Stein (1871-1958), born Modest Aronstam, became embroiled in a plot with New York based Jewish anarchists to murder a prominent businessman. He even went so far as to carry sticks of dynamite towards the man's house in an attempt to blow him up. In Denver we also had an anarchist, er, I mean "activist", who allegedly conspired to blow up people too, in this case, police officers. Denver named a branch library after him. Stein wasn't as fortunate but he had enough sense to realize the folly of his ways and so he moved away from political anarchism to concentrate instead on a career in art, eventually producing scores of memorable magazine covers for a wide variety of pulps and slicks. This issue of Clues Detective Stories with Stein's cover art representing Donald Wandrei's crime story The Painted Nudes was published in April, 1939.

Future "Easel" postings will highlight other decades. Keep your brushes wet.

[© August, 2019, Jeffersen]