Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Walter Dean Goldbeck, Who Could Have Been Really Good


The image above is called Light of New York, painted by Walter Dean Goldbeck (1882 - 1925) around 1911 for a General Electric advertisement and later used as the 1 August 1914 cover illustration for Judge magazine and later as a sheet music cover illustration. A good deal of information on it can be found here, along with a few scraps of biographical information.

Goldbeck, born in St. Louis and died at age 43 in New York City, apparently did portraiture along with commercial art and flirted with Modernism in some of his Fine Art paintings. So far, not much of his work can be found via a Google search.

The illustrations by Goldbeck that I did find varied in quality from mediocre to interestingly well-done. Too bad he died at a comparatively young age.

Gallery

From "Shogan's Daughter"

Judge cover art, 8 May 1915

"Pippins" - Puck cover art - 31 October 1914

1 comment:

Jeff A. Menges said...

I found an image recently- absent from the comments at Grapefruit Moon Gallery, but leading me to believe that Goldbeck got at least 4 checks out of this image. Also in 1914, it was used for a Kelly Springfield Tire ad, appearing as the back cover of a Spring issue of Judge, with the tires added to the image. I'll post shortly—
Jeff A. Menges