Frank Godwin, Illustrator and Cartoonist

Even in so-called Golden Ages, the life of a free-lance commercial artist could be a hand-to-mouth progression from assignment to assignment. Sort of like being in show business, one might think. I suspect show biz folks are usually happy when they find themselves in a long-term gig, be it on a television series or a perpetual stint on the Las Vegas strip. And those illustrators conscious that success could easily be blown away by a change in fashion were probably on the lookout for steady work under contract.

Illustrators active in the 1960s when the market for mass-circulation magazine art was going through its collapse often seemed to jump to doing book cover illustrations, portraiture or genre painting on subjects with perennial appeal.

The illustration market in the 1930s was not swooning in the 1960s sense, but times were still tight given that the Great Depression was in full force. Star illustrators such as Norman Rockwell were still doing fine, but middle-rank folks' prospects were less bright. Dropping down to painting covers for pulp-fiction magazines could bring in money, but could easily be a longer-term career-killer in terms of one's reputation in the trade. (This wasn't so much a problem for young illustrators who had yet to establish a reputation; some were able to use pulps as a stepping-stone to illustrating in the "slicks.")

The comic book as we have known it had yet to emerge, but there might be opportunities in the form of newspaper comic strips. Comic strip artists in the first third of the 20th century seem to have generally entered that field via doing other kinds of artwork for newspapers. An exception was Frank Godwin (1889-1959) who, even before the Depression hit, decided to create a comic strip ("Connie") as a hedge against an already declining market for book illustration, one of his main activities. Well, that's my guess as to his motivation. In any case, aside from a period around the time of World War 2, Godwin was doing comic strips up until very close to the time of his death. Illustration work continued, especially during the hiatus in comics work just noted.

Biographical information about Godwin can be found here and here, both sites also containing examples of his work.

In terms of career paths, Godwin was a kind of mirror image of Noel Sickles, who I wrote about here, and Alex Raymond, famed for creating the Flash Gordon strip. Sickles abandoned comic strips after only a few years to become a full-time illustrator whereas Raymond did some illustration work while continuing with comics.

Here are a few examples of Godwin's work: Click on images to enlarge.

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Book cover illustration: Treasure Island

"Abbott Robert of St. Mary's Collecting Rent from His Tenants" - 1932
Above are two examples of Godwin's color illustrations. He also was skilled at pen-and-ink as well as brush-and-black-ink illustrations, techniques popular before 1930.

Sunday panel for "Connie" - c.1929
Connie started as a domestic strip, but evolved into an adventure comic and eventually went on to science-fiction in the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon mode. From the characters' hairdos, I'm guessing that the panel above was from around the end of the 1920s.

Texaco advertisement - 1941
Godwin did a series of ads for Texaco in which his name was prominently featured.

"Rusty Riley" daily panel - 1956
Rusty was his longest-running strip, appearing both daily and Sunday. The daily panels were printed black-and-white, so Godwin was able to incorporate his skilled pen work for shading, tedious though that might have been at deadline time. The Sunday panels were printed in color, so such shading wasn't really necessary and Godwin did less of it.

Brangwyn's Railroad Posters

Sir Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) is perhaps best remembered for his murals. He also did easel paintings and posters, many of the latter in support of Britain's effort in the Great War.

But that was not all. For a while in the 1920s he created a few posters for what became the London and North Eastern Railway, a major line that ran trains from London into Scotland along a route near the eastern coast of the island. (The London, Midland and Scottish followed a more westerly path north, while the Great Western and Southern railroads served other locations.)

At the time Brangwyn created the designs shown below, a trend toward simplified images was getting underway. Perhaps because Brangwyn was probably incapable of delivering a simplified image, his career in railroad poster making was comparatively brief.

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Durham

Firth of Forth Bridge

Scotland

Over the Nidd near Harrogate

Arthur Beaumont, Mentor to R.G. Smith

The image above is the painting "Famous 4 Minutes," a depiction of the crisis point of the Battle of Midway during World War 2 when three of a group of four Japanese aircraft carriers were destroyed in a dive-bombing attack. The artist is R.G. (Robert Grant) Smith (1914- 2001), a man with the unusual credentials of being a professional engineer as well as an accomplished artist -- and one of my favorites in the aviation art genre. More information about Smith is here.

Smith credited his growth as an artist to attending informal plein-air classes given by Arthur Beaumont, for many years the U.S. Navy's main artist.

Beaumont (1890-1978), born Arthur Edwin Crabbe in Norfolk, England, emigrated to the USA from Canada in 1908. He changed his name to Arthur Beaumont-Crabbe in 1915 and to Arthur Beaumont in 1919. Information about him is hit-and-miss on the Internet. Two easy-access sources are here and here. This site has detailed information regarding Beaumont's formal art training, but its performance was flaky at the time I drafted this post. I got both the welcome page plus an error message when the site opened. But one can still click on the biographical link to the left to get to the details.

What really counts is Beaumont's art. He painted mostly in watercolor (Smith tended to use oils), and favored a loose style while making sure to incorporate nothing but correct details of ships and equipment.

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Flank Speed

Together We Served

USS Los Angeles

USS Columbus

It is interesting that Smith learned a good deal of painting lore from Beaumont without falling into the generally sketchy, overly dramatic style Beaumont practiced. Perhaps the reason is his background as an engineer who worked on general-arangement drawings was well as presentation art for Douglas (El Segundo) during the 1940s and 50s under ace designer Ed Heinemann.

As for Beaumont, I have to say that I don't particularly care for his paintings. Besides the dramatic poses and heavy seas he often favored, I think something as solid and well-defined as a large naval vessel needs to be shown with a little more of those attributes than Beaumont usually gave them. To me, Smith's ships are more convincing.

Galbraith's Pampered Women

William Galbraith Crawford (1894-1978) was a cartoonist / illustrator who left many examples of his work, but little trace of his personal life if Google search results are any indication.

Walt Reed in his book "The Illustrator in America" states that Crawford (who signed his work "Galbraith") was Born in Salt Lake City and attended Brigham Young University for two years before going on to the Art Students League and other art schools. Much of his career was devoted to the "Side Glances" single-panel newspaper cartoon that he took over from George Clark in 1939.

I am more partial to some cartoons he did for The New Yorker magazine in the 1930s that featured glamorous young ladies who were often being kept by rich, older men. My reason is that Galbraith did a really nice job of drawing them.

Below are some examples. The first one is a World War 2 vintage "Side Glances" panel. The others are crude scans I made from my copy of "The New Yorker 25th Anniversary Album" from 1950. Even though the images are more than 70 years old, I assume that Condé Nast holds the copyright, and therefore is given credit here.

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From "Side Glances"
I could not find a caption for this cartoon. I include it to show Galbraith's post-New Yorker style.

Caption: "Darling, I'm sorry I called you a tramp."
For some reason (probably having to do with the image as it appeared in the book as opposed to the magazine) we have a waffle background pattern. The best that I, not a scanning jock, could manage.

Caption: "I haven't taken any interest in politics since Jimmy Walker retired."
James J. ("Jimmy") Walker was New York City's bon-vivant mayor 1926-32 who had to resign due to scandal.

Caption: "I never told her about the depression. She would have worried."

Caption: "And if Roosevelt is not reelected, perhaps even a villa in Newport, my dearest sweet."

Caption: "Now if Jimmy boy doesn't try to steal this next scene, Yvonne will buy him a great big ice-cream cone."
I think this is the best-drawn of the lot. The poses and details strike me as being spot-on.

John Clymer's Countryside Covers

Up until shortly before 1920, the population of the United States was more than half what the Census Bureau defines as "rural." By that, the Bureau meant either living outside any kind of town or else living in a town or built-up area of less than 2,500 population. The rural share of population continued to decline after that point, but its nostalgic echo remained in the popular mind.

The Saturday Evening Post was the dominant general-interest, mass circulation magazine in the United States during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and its editors did their best to select cover illustrations that appealed to as many current and potential readers as possible. The most famous Post cover artist is Norman Rockwell, but he obviously couldn't be burdened with producing an illustration every week; his production at best was around one cover illustration per month. Thankfully for the Post, there were plenty of other illustrators willing and largely able to take up the slack.

Some of those illustrators had artistic "personalities" more distinct than others. One of these was John Clymer (1907-1989) whose Wikipedia entry is here.

My mother always enjoyed seeing cover art by Clymer because he was born and raised where she went to college -- Ellensburg, Washington, a small city just on the east side of the Cascade mountain range. Clymer mostly painted outdoor scenes from the Mountain West part of North America, these for advertising, art gallery sales and magazine illustration.

Being a city boy, I was never as taken with Clymer's work as was my mother. And today my opinion is that his work was professionally competent, yet somehow lacking in the spark that sets top-notch artists and illustrators apart from the ordinary. That said, there is no denying that Clymer had a successful career: painting even one Post cover was a large feather in any illustrator's cap.

Below is a chronologically arranged selection of Clymer's cover art for the Post.
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The setting for this illustration is easy for me to identity. The mountain in the background is Mt. Hood in the state of Oregon as seen from the east in the fruit orchard region near the Columbia River, perhaps on the Washington State side.

The two covers above obviously have Mountain West settings, but I'm not sure where. The illustration immediately above shows mountains similar to those Clymer would have seen near Ellensburg, but I can't be sure that they aren't the Tetons or some other cluster of jagged peaks.

This looks like Vermont, New Hampshire or Upstate New York. It is not a Mountain West scene for once.

Orchards again, but the green, rounded hills don't remind me of orchard county in Washington or British Columbia.

Back in the Mountain West. The upper scene could be in any number of places. The lower cover has pretty dramatic mountains, but I can't place them; can any reader help?

The source site indicates that the image is of Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Deco by Dupas

The painting shown above is Les Perruches, c.1925, by Jean Dupas (1882-1964) who, along with Tamara de Lempicka and perhaps a few others, epitomizes Art Deco art. A short Wikipedia entry is here and a more extensive biography is here.

It seems that Dupas was very well-trained, but chose to earn his living more in commercial art than in fine arts. As for the latter, he was a muralist as much as he was an easel painter.

Dupas' commercial style is distinctive in that he regularly drew women with long necks and often with narrow, aquiline noses. And although it was hardly Deco fashion, he sometimes gave his women elaborate hairstyles and hats evoking fashion of 200 years earlier.

Given that I'm greatly interested in the 1920s and 30s, I am fond of Dupas' work.

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Poster - 1924

Poster - 1925

Bordeaux poster - 1937
Dupas was born in Bordeaux, so might have put more heart than usual into this poster.

L'Hiver - 1928

Woman seated in front of portrait

Deco scene - 1929

History of Navigation mural from the Normandie - 1934
A link with information about the mural is here.

Jeune fille aux fleurs
This seems to be a later work -- say, from 1940 or later, given the hair style of the subject.

Covarrubias the Caricaturist

Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957) was a multi-talented man, his activities ranging from cartooning to ethnography, as his Wikipedia entry indicates. As you might imagine, it was the artwork, not the anthropology, that made him widely known and popular over three highly productive decades; his illustrations seemed to be popping up everywhere.

Examples of his work can be found here, and this site seems to be devoted to him exclusively.

As can be seen below, Covarrubias' work was witty, charming and inoffensive to most viewers. In those respects, it was in line with the tastes of the day. In recent times, illustrators seem to feel compelled to create "edgy" works that lack charm, are often offensive, and incorporate no wit whatsoever. Pendulums do swing back eventually, though I see little sign of it happening as yet.

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Sally Rand and Martha Graham contrasted
This Vanity Fair illustration from around 1933 was part of a long series where Covarrubias caricatured two individuals who possessed both similarities and differences. Martha Graham's dance troupe worked in a modernist idiom. Sally Rand gained fame for her fan dancing at the 1933 Chicago world's fair.

Tea Gossip - c.1925
A cartoon from early in his career.

Cartoon map of Mexico - 1947
He painted a number of cartoon maps and murals. Click to enlarge.

Vogue cover - 1 July, 1937

Herbert Hoover - Vanity Fair cover - October, 1931
For non-American readers, Herbert Hoover was President in 1929 when the stock market crashed and was blamed for the severity of the Great Depression even though his policies were similar to those followed by his successor, Franklin Roosevelt, which didn't work very well either.

Mussolini - Vanity Fair cover - October, 1932
I trust we all know who this guy was. The little fellow tugging on Mussolini's ear is probably the king of Italy.

Bali scene - c.1930s
Covarrubias and his wife visited Bali a couple of times in the 1930s. He did ethnographic work there and wrote a book about it.

Stark Davis' Lincoln Birds

In 1928 and perhaps a little before and after, Lincoln automobiles had an advertising campaign featuring their cars against a backdrop of exotic birds and, in one instance, a butterfly.

The artist was Winthrop Stark Davis (1885-1950) who signed his paintings "Stark Davis" and whose fine arts work also dealt with such birds. The only biographical information about his that I could locate is here, and it's pretty skimpy.

That means I'm reduced to showing some examples from that series of Lincoln ads, so here goes:

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1927 Lincoln Berline Laundalet

1928 Lincoln Cabriolet

1928 Lincoln Club Roadster

1928 Lincoln Coupe

1928 Lincoln Town Sedan

c.1928 Lincoln Sport Phaeton