Cutaway to G.H. Davis

When I was young I used to come across illustrations by the Illustrated London News' technical guy G.H. (George Horace) Davis (1881-1960). I could find little on Davis on the Internet: this link has a biographical squib just below the portrait photos.

Not that I read the ILN anyplace but in the form of bound issues in the college library stacks, it's just that his work would be reproduced elsewhere and I would notice his distinctive signature.

Davis' specialty was cutaway illustrations where exteriors are selectively peeled away to reveal structural and functional interior details. His main subjects were airplanes and ships, though he also used his approach on other items as needed by his editor. And he did non-cutaway paintings on the side.

Here are examples of his work. Click on the images to enlarge.

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HMS Ark Royal - 1939

High-altitude aircraft - 1930s

Bristol Beaufighter - early 1940s

Hawker Hurricane - c.1940

Supermarine Spitfire - c.1940

Photo of a Spitfire and a Hurricane together

I'm pretty sure that Davis "freehanded" most of his illustrations. Compare his Hurricane and, especially, Spitfire with those in the photograph. A charitable explanation is that he had to do these drawings on a tight deadline and lacked time to work up the images mechanically from three-view drawings as an architect would do when preparing a rendering of a structure. This method or something analogous was used in Davis' time by cutaway artists for British aviation magazine who apparently were allowed longer lead-times. Artists who do paintings of aircraft also generally begin with mechanical delineation; failure to do so would run a strong risk of making a distorted image.

Another problem Davis and other aircraft cutaway specialist faced was security; too much detail might be useful to enemies in times before aircraft could be shot down and examined. For example, Davis' Beaufighter is the daytime version. The radar-equipped night fighter flew only over Britain on interceptor missions, so His Majesty's Government would be most unhappy if Davis had spilled any airborne radar-related beans in 1941 or '42.

John Whitcomb: Never-Changing Style

I recently posted the first in an occasional series of posts about illustrators who changed their style in order to maintain their careers. Those who failed to do that either had shooting star careers or were the fortunate few who successfully worked for decades with few or no adjustments. Most famous of the latter is Norman Rockwell, who never went out of style and now is on the fringe of being considered a member of the fine arts crew. J.C. Leyendecker had a long run as well, but fell out of favor after a 30-ish year run.

In the present post I deal with Jon Whitcomb (1906-1988) who also did well for decades with minor style adjustments. His brief Wikipedia entry is here. Matthew Innis provides examples of Whitcomb's work along with quotations dealing with the female face, Whitcomb's primary subject. A slightly sour take on Whitcomb is here.

For a number of Whitcomb illustrations that have dates assigned, click here. One illustration is dated 1930, but that must be incorrect, given the fashions depicted; I'd say 1940 would be closer.

This brings to mind the fact that I cannot find examples of his work from earlier than the late 1930s on the Internet (though I might have overlooked some). Whitcomb was in his early 30s by that time and surely must have been in a career-building mode before then. Illustration Magazine notes that Whitcomb is in the queue for a future article; perhaps that will reveal some early exmaples.

Here is some of his production (he presented himself as a businessman cranking out product, not as an artist):

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Advertisement for 1939 Cadillac 62
The illustration is signed, so presumably Whitcomb also did the car rendering. However, for years it was common for one artist to do the car and another one the setting. Until I get more information I'll take the signature as proof.

Magazine illustration - 1939
This was done about the same time as the car ad. It shows that Whitcomb had attained his mature style by that point.

Collier's magazine cover - 12 August 1941

"I think I love you" - magazine illustration
Archetypical Jon Whitcomb.

Woman wearing large hat
No signature, but plenty of web sites claim it's a Whitcomb. If so, I'd guess it was from the 1960s.

Minimal face
A great illustration, also likely from the 1960s (can any reader help us on this?).

Jon Whitcomb specialized in the "big face" type of illustration that emerged in women's magazines during the 1940s and remained dominant into the mid-1960s. He did it very well, creating personal fame and earning a bundle of money. Lovely though much of his work is, it's hard to argue that it's anything beyond superficial on any other dimension. From what I've read about him, it's a good chance that Whitcomb would agree as he hopped into his fancy car to head for the bank to deposit the latest check.

When Eduardo Benito Was in Vogue

Eduardo Benito (1891-1981) was an icon of the Art Deco era. When I was young I enjoyed seeing his work while flipping through library copies of old issues of the Art Directors Annual, a publication that taught me more than any other about the history of commercial art from the late 1920s into the 1950s.

Here is the best biographical information I could find about Benito on the Internet. It seems that magazine publishing magnate Condé Nast kept Benito busy doing covers for Vanity Fair when he wasn't producing Vogue covers for him. Not a bad gig for an illustrator from Spain.

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Vogue cover - April 1927

Vanity Fair cover - August 1931

Vogue cover - August 1929

Vanity Fair cover - March 1929

Illustration - 1928

Koloman Moser Did It All

Koloman Moser (1868-1918) was one of the leading lights of the Vienna Secession and probably the most versatile of the lot. He designed furniture, posters, stained glass windows and household objects besides doing a little painting. Moreover, the work he did was generally of very high quality (with an exception noted below).

Biographical information on Moser can be found here and here. There are books about him as well; check Amazon or another web site for details.

Here are a few examples of his work:

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Poster design (not used) for first Secession exhibit - 1898

Poster design - "Read!"

Frommes calendar - 1899

Secession Exhibition poster - 1902

Window, Steinhof chapel - 1905

Cruet stand - 1904-05

100 Crown banknote, Austria-Hungary Bank - 1910

The Three Graces
For some reason Moser was not adept at painting, or so I think. This one is better than most, but still rather messy compared to the clean, well-designed posters, bookmarks and other graphic work he produced.

1920s Paris Fashion Illustration

Fashion illustration is not dead. My evidence for this is the presence on Barnes & Noble bookstore shelves of several how-to and historical compilation books dealing with the subject.

But it might be on life-support. I just did quick flick-throughs of the Paris Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and did not notice a single human-rendered illustration: it was all photography. Not to mention those large-scale videos of fashion show runway models one can see as background clutter in shops.

I don't subscribe to the New York edition of The New York Times any more. So I don't know if the department stores in town still do much advertising there and, if they do, illustrate their ads with drawings rather than photographs.

Several decades ago the paper was packed with fashion advertisements illustrated with ink wash drawings by Dorothy Hood and other well-known artists. Photography was not used, I suspect, because of reproduction quality (lack of) on newsprint paper. Slick-paper magazines didn't have reproduction quality problems and had shifted to photography by then.

Back in the 1920s fashion photography was rare. Paris boasted fashion magazines that appeared weekly, featuring artwork by a corps of hardworking illustrators.

Those illustrations were a form of news reporting. Nothing very flashy and glamorous: that was the role of advertisements of the couturier houses. Drawings were straightforward, featuring the clothing. Poses were simple and faces were depicted as being attractive but not so much as to steal the show from the garments.

I find it all rather charming. Too bad it's highly unlikely that we'll ever see much in the way of these likes again.

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This is a weekly fashion magazine from 1929.

And here is a spread from a 1928 issue of L'Art et la Mode.

This is something fancier: it's printed in color.

More color. Note the geometric shapes in the background: Modernism rules!!

Click on images to enlarge.

Edd Cartier: Wry Sci-Fi Art

Edward D. Cartier (1914-2008) was an illustrator who specialized in science-fiction. I saw his work fairly often as a budding teenager during the era when sci-fi magazines had largely abandoned their pulp heritage and were appearing in digest or semi-digest format with better quality paper. By the time I reached my twenties I'd drifted from short-story sci-fi in magazines to paperback novels and Cartier faded from my view. That was quite a while ago.

So it surprised me to learn recently while exploring the Internet that Edd (he combined the "Ed" from his given name with his middle initial to derive his professional monicker) died fairly recently after attaining an old age riper than most of us can expect. He rated an obituary in The New York Times that provides a decent amount of detail regarding his life (link here).

As the obit notes, Cartier saw combat in Europe. He was badly wounded in the Battle of the Bulge (earning a Bronze Star along with the Purple Heart) and further wounded during medical evacuation. This didn't affect his wryly humorous take on bedrock components of science fiction illustrations of the day: spaceships, alien monsters, gorgeous women and the heroic men who save them from whatever fate authors could dream up.

Contrast this with illustrator Gilbert Bundy who, I as mentioned here, could not shake off his combat zone experiences and eventually killed himself.

The market for science fiction was not large when Cartier was active in the field, so he eventually found himself day jobs and, so far as I know, continued sci-fi on the side. Very sensible.

Below are examples of Edd Cartier's work beginning with one of his pulp mag illustrations for a Shadow story before World War 2.

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Illustration (cropped) for Shadow pulp magazine story, 1930s.

Magazine cover, 1940.

An example of Cartier's alien species.

Girl meets alien.

Mad scientist? Or just an old techie slaving over an even older adding machine?

Space explorer babe from 1952.

I really should do a comparative analysis, but for now I'll go with my gut feeling that Cartier had more ability than almost any other sci-fi magazine illustrator active in the 1950s.

Suicidal Illustrators

By Gilbert Bundy (1911-55)

By Henry Raleigh (1880-1944)

By Pruett Carter (1891-1955)

Committing suicide must seem like a good idea for people at the time they do it. Depending on the circumstances, others find the reasoning sensible or not. I have nothing profound to say about the matter; this post simply notes that a few well-known (in their day) illustrators ended their lives this way.

Wikipedia, my usual go-to for biographical links, seems lacking when it comes to prominent American illustrators of the 1920-60 era. But why read Wikipedia when I can link to David Apatoff who has deep knowledge of illustrators?

Apatoff treats Gilbert Bundy in this post, describing Bundy's harrowing experience during World War 2 that was probably a major factor in his suicide a decade or so later.

In a recent post Apatoff offers a lighthearted take on Henry Raleigh's interest in the bare shoulders of 1920s and early 1930s women in party dresses at fancy occasions. But an earlier post deals with Raleigh's career, touching on his high living when he was one of America's best-paid illustrators and despair when illustration fashions changed during the later 1930s and he ran out of work and money. His solution was to leap from a window.

Charley Parker has a brief take on Pruett Carter here, but doesn't mention the end of the story. For that, read Fred Taraba's new book on illustrators (that I reviewed here). For unclear reasons, Carter shot and killed his wife and son, then shot himself. I find the first two killings inexcusable and the third one justifiable, given what he had just done.

I think that all of this is sad indeed, in part because I greatly enjoyed the art these illustrators made during their successful years. But top-notch illustrators such as these were as human as the rest of us, and life is seldom a smooth journey. Bundy, Raleigh and Carter seem to have seen both higher heights and lower depths than most of the rest of us.

Review: Masters of American Illustration

Amazon says it won't be out until mid-August, but my copy arrived a few days ago. That's Fred Taraba's book "Masters of American Illustration: 41 Illustrators & How They Worked" from the publisher of Illustration Magazine (link here).

I'm pretty cheap, but bought the book directly from the publisher instead of Amazon because I want them to stay in the business of providing junkies such as me biographies of illustrators and examples of their work; direct orders provide a better profit cut.

In his introduction Taraba tells us that the book originated as 41 articles in a magazine called "Step-by-Step-Graphics" in the 1990s. At the time he was working at the Society of Illustrators, so had access to both written material and people who could supply information and insights regarding the artists, all of whom were dead by 1989 when the project started.

The book contains the text of those articles with the minor changes that 20 years of new information and author insights inevitably bring. Also new were "more than 50" images.

Taraba's magazine articles did not cover Norman Rockwell, Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and a few other titans of the field because accounts of their lives and work had been the subject articles and books and therefore not worth repeating.

I'm pleased that Taraba did include some of my favorites such as Mead Schaeffer, Saul Tepper and John LaGatta. Also in the book are some illustrators I'm not familiar with such as F.O.C. Darley. Then there a few whose inclusion I question such as Margaret Brundage whose ability to depict human anatomy was well under par for a professional illustrator of her era. But she did sci-fi/horror magazine covers, and the quality her work met the lower expectations for that genre in those days.

The illustrations in the book are nicely reproduced. Each artist's section begins with a two-page spread where one page is devoted to a single illustration, and there are other large illustrations that help the reader get a feeling for the artist's technique.

Speaking of technique (a factor of the book's "How They Worked" subtitle), depth of information varies from artist to artist. No doubt this was largely driven by material available to Taraba, so I can't fault him. Still, there were cases when the topic was barely touched on. Others such as Harry Beckhoff's writeup had significant detail.

There were informational gems including the fact that several illustrators made frequent use of mixed media. Given my woeful art training in college, I had blithely assumed that oil was oil, watercolor was watercolor, casein was casein, gouache was gouache and so on. It is only recently that I've been discovering (poor, ignorant me!) that illustrators would use whatever tool it took to get the job done, be it a touch of pastel in a highlight or some pencil on bits requiring detailed work. After all, their work was reproduced, so discrepancy between original art and what magazine readers saw was both expected and exploited by a canny illustrator.

Biographical information is also patchy depending on the subject, so there were cases where I wished there was a little more detail regarding an artist's training and personal life. But detailed information is where Illustration magazine steps in; much or all of an issue can be devoted a single illustrator.

Despite the small criticisms presented above, my reaction to the book is very favorable. It's far better than the generally shallow, chatty (but by no means useless) 1951 "Illustrating for the Saturday Evening Post" by Ashley Halsey, Jr. which covers 62 artists who contributed to the magazine during the late 1940s. Taraba's text is indeed informative as are the illustrations. The book takes a proud place on the shelf I reserve for illustration.

Harry Beckhoff: Starting Small

When I'm out having a cup of coffee I usually grab four or five extra paper napkins to make use of while I'm sipping. Sometimes I'm making lists of potential blog topics or, if I already have a subject in mind, I might outline or list items I could include.

Other times, I might sketch car designs or poses nearby people assume. And I've found that fine-point ball point pens work just fine on napkins provided there is more than one napkin layer (some cushioning helps prevent the pen from gouging through the paper).

These drawing are small, seldom exceeding two inches (5 cm) in the longest direction. And because they're small, I can't get hung up with details -- a good practice that counteracts tendencies to make images more "complete" than they should be.

Harry Beckhoff (1901-1979) was an illustrator who worked in thumbnail sketch mode. He didn't make large, sweeping-gesture sketches and then boil them down to production size. Instead, he had his thumbnails enlarged and then traced them as the basis for the final job.

Leif Peng mentions this unconventional practice in this post about Beckhoff. Another take on him is here. Otherwise, there seems to little information about him on the Internet.

I find Beckhoff's work charming, and hope you too will like the following examples.

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This is the only thumbnail I could discover on the Web, but it gives us a pretty good idea of what Beckhoff was up to.

Nearly everything he did had a touch of humor. This was supported by his technique which was a blend of cartooning and straight illustration.

I don't have titles for most of the examples, so I'll invent my own where I can. This one I call "Snow-Fallen."

Here Beckhoff presents an interest dramatic situation: fill in the blanks.

Perhaps this is half of a spread, but it still works as an illustration.

This is a 1950 illustration for a Collier's story titled "The Third Level." It shows New York's Grand Central Terminal with one fellow 40 years out of synch with the other fashions. Might have been an interesting story.

Here's a early 1940s vintage illustration I'll call "Running Late."

Sundblom's Buttery Illustrations

Haddon Sundblom (1899-1976) is one of those illustrators whose work I greatly respect and almost, but don't quite, love.

His Wikipedia entry offers a too-short sketch of his career. At least it makes the point that a number of other competent illustrators worked at his studio and were influenced by him; this is one of his important claims to fame.

Leif Peng has dealt with Sundblom on his blog, and you might want to click on these links.

What maintains Sundblom's fame (among illustration buffs, anyway) is the work he did for Coca-Cola. He painted many illustrations of Coke-enjoying people for print, poster and billboard advertising. But the big thing was his Santa Claus series and, to a lesser extent, the "Frosty" character -- a smiling elfin creature always posed by a bottle or glass of the beverage.

Here are examples of Sundblom's work, with a slight emphasis on his earlier illustrations.
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We might as well start with a Santa. From what I've read, Sunblom began to use himself as his model as he aged into the part.

Here's Sundblom when he was older and in synch with his Santas.

And, just for the record, here is a Coke ad, probably from the 1940s.

Now for some non-Coke illustrations, this being an ante-bellum Southern scene.

A 1920's illustration.

Also from the 20's.

Magazine cover art.

This is a later painting, probably done in the 1940s when he applied paints thicker and smoothly, a practice he was following by the mid-1930s.

Magazine work from 1933.

I respect Sundblom for his skill in portrayal and, especially, for his way of handling paint in a pleasing thick, buttery manner.

Yet something bothers me just enough that I can't place Sundblom with contemporaries such as Dean Cormwell, John La Gatta and Mead Schaeffer. Maybe it had to do with stereotyping or pigeonholing by clients and art directors. Perhaps it was Sundblom's preference. In any event, the result was that little of his work had drama or "bite" of any kind. To some degree this is like fellow Chicago illustrator Andrew Loomis whose style was somewhat similar and whose subjects were more pleasant than edgy or dramatic. This is not to say that I favor drama and edginess -- though a whiff of something like that either in subject matter or painting technique appeals to me for some reason.