Dan Content: A Dean Cornwell Disciple

Dan Content (1902-1990) was born in New York City and grew up there. His art training took place there too, at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Art Students League in Manhattan. Some additional polish was added via studying for a while under Dean Cornwell (links here and here), whose thick brushwork style Content used during the 1920s and into the 1930s.

There are few resources regarding Content on the Internet, perhaps the best of the lot being here. As it notes, he eased out of illustration into art direction, including a stint at Benton & Bowles, a major advertising agency at the time. This was probably a good career move, given the slow decline in high-paying illustration jobs. As an art director, Content got a steady paycheck and didn't have to worry about altering his painting style to keep up with changing illustration fashions.

Content did good, solid work, but remains somewhat obscure perhaps due to his stylistic similarity to much better-known Cornwell.

Gallery

Herders

Burial Detail

McCall's illustration for Sabatini's "An Act of Faith" - September 1928

Illustration for Sabatini's "The Nuptials of Corbigny" - 1927

Illustration for "Robin Hood" - 1928
A complete set of images for this project can be found here.

Story illustration

Story Illustration

Illustration for "The Song Without Words" - Ladies' Home Journal - March 1937

Frank Tinsley: Illustrator of the "Gee Whiz!"

Frank Tinsley (1899-1965) was an illustrator who specialized in machines. Aircraft, usually, but also ships, trains, cars, space ships and any other speculative technology that pulp and semi-pulp magazine editors tossed his way. By the 1950s he was often called upon to write the articles that he was illustrating. So he had a nice little niche and filled it well.

Here is biographical information, and links with plenty of examples of his work are here and here.

Tinsley worked in color when doing magazine covers, but much of his article illustrations were two-color, the norm for the likes of Mechanix Illustrated, where he did a good deal of illustration following World War 2.

During the 1930s his drawing wasn't always accurate, but he improved somewhat as time went on. Apparently his editors and fans weren't troubled.

Gallery

Bill Barnes magazine cover - October 1934 or 1935
This seems to be a Curtiss BF2C or something like it. The fuselage is too large, too long, if we use the pilot as a scale reference. The upper and lower wings are out of perspective, seeming too close together.

Bill Barnes magazine cover - January 1936
Shown here is the Boeing model 299, or XB-17 Flying Fortress that first flew in 1935. Although Tinsley got the various parts in roughly the correct shapes, they are out of scale. The perspective is off -- the axes of the wings and horizontal stabilizers on the tail diverge with distance, whereas the opposite would be correct. Also, the 299 was never painted, nor were other 1930s B-17s, yet Tinsley gave it current Army Air Corps colors (sort of -- the green is wrong and the orange should be more yellow).

Air Trails magazine cover - April 1937
This is a Fokker G I two-place fighter that flew for the first time in March of 1937, about the time the magazine hit the news stands. Therefore, Tinsley must have been working from other drawings and perhaps photos of the plane on the ground. As usual, details are wrong. For instance, the unit housing the pilot and gunner is too small relative to the rest of the aircraft. Further, for some reason the plane doesn't carry actual Dutch insignia.

Air Trails magazine cover - August 1938
Featured here are two Junkers Ju 86 bombers, but they are carrying civilian rather than military markings.

Air Trails magazine cover - April 1948
That's a Northrop YB-49 flying wing bomber. I'm not sure why rocket-like flames are spewing out behind its jet engines. The escort fighters are purely Tinsley's imagination. Their fuselages resemble that of the Bell XS-1 that broke the sound barrier the previous October. The wings and tail are swept back, unlike the XS-1. On the other hand, Tinsley's fighters seem to have rocket motors like the XS-1, but are shut off, a jet engine being in use. Yet I don't notice any air intake for a jet engine. Oh well....

Mechanix Illustrated magazine illustration - 1948
Here we see what the McDonnell XP-85 (later XF-85) Goblin "parasite fighter" might have looked like had it entered service. The B-36 bomber shown in the image supposedly had a 10,000 mile range, far in excess of any potential escort fighter, so one idea was to have them carry tiny escort fighters for deployment as necessary. Two prototypes were actually built and a few test drops were made from a specially modified B-29, but the project was cancelled due to its impracticality. As usual, Tinsley's drawing is off: the XF-85 fuselage was actually shorter and chunkier, and the tail units were closer together. The B-36 is poorly drawn as well, the wings seemingly drooping and the cockpit glazing pulled too far around the side of the aircraft.

Magazine illustration - 1950
This is the left-hand part of a two-page spread. The helicopters are conjectural, so I can't criticize how they are drawn. I include this because it embodies the "gee-whiz" sort of speculative future technology that Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Mechanix Illustrated and perhaps other magazines featured for many years. The idea of ordinary people replacing their automobiles with personal helicopters is clearly insane for a number of good reasons, including what would happen in inevitable collisions and engine/rotor failures.

Mechanix Illustrated magazine illustration - August 1955
The U.S. Air Force funded development of an atomic reactor powered bomber, but the project was cancelled for reasons of practicality. Here Tinsley (who wrote the article) came up with a speculative design of a delta-wing flying boat bomber that used hydro-skis like those on the Navy's XF2Y Sea Dart fighter that first flew in 1953, but never saw service.

Moon base illustration - 1959
Finally, an atomic-powered rocket ship seen blasting off (or landing, maybe), and a base on the moon.

Some Collier's Magazine Cover Artists

Collier's magazine in its original form ceased publication in 1957 (a revival was briefly attempted a few years ago). But for much of its existence it was a major American general-interest publication, being second only to the Saturday Evening Post.

As such, it's covers featured many of America's leading illustrators, though not the Post's star Norman Rockwell. Below is a sampling of Collier's covers I assembled, each by a different established illustrator.

Gallery

J.C. Leyendecker
The United States' "Great White Fleet" was on its around-the-world cruise in 1907 where Japan was to be one of its stopping points, hence the Japanese naval ensign as backdrop.  Hostility was building between the countries, but the fleet's reception in Japan was cordial.  A curiosity is the 7 December issue date, given that Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy exactly 34 years later.

Henry Reuterdahl
Reuterdahl is noted for his portrayal of ships.  Here he depicts sailors, presumably on their return from the world cruise.

Maxfield Parrish

Sarah Stilwell Weber

Herbert Paus

C.C. Beall

Ronald McLeod
In the late spring of 1939, King George VI of Britain and Queen Elizabeth toured the United States and Canada.

Jon Whitcomb

Martha Sawyers

Chesley Bonestell
Collier's published a multi-issue study of space travel in the early 1950s.

Sarah Stilwell Weber: More Than Kiddie Covers

Sarah Stilwell Weber (1878-1939) or (1863-1935), both sets of dates are in various places on the Internet, was a successful illustrator during the first two decades of the 20th century. Her illustrations graced the covers and interiors of several leading magazines as well as books and advertisements.

Unfortunately, I can find little in the way of information about her on the Internet, though two sites dealing with her are here and here.

What little detail follows is gleaned from Walt Reed's "The Illustrator in America, 1860-2000." Reed and other sources I'm inclined to trust have 1878-1939 as her dates. She studied under Howard Pyle both at Drexel and in summer sessions at Chadd's Ford. Reed also notes her book illustration work and some advertising clients.

That being that, all I can do is present some examples of her work.

Gallery

Harper's magazine interior page - February 1903
Stilwell was hitting the big-time around age 25.

Collier's - August 1907

Collier's cover art - 17 March 1906
One of Stilwell's best-known works.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 19 January 1916
It seems she borrowed the general idea ten years later for Collier's rival, the Post.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 29 January 1910

Saturday Evening Post cover - 20 August 1910
Many of her covers used children as subjects.

Vogue cover - 15 October 1912
More leopard, this time skinned, and for Vogue.

Vogue cover - 15 June 1913
This seems to be unsigned, but Internet sites credit her with the illustration.

Collier's cover - 9 May 1914
A really fine illustration here.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 3 March 1917
The Russian-type costume was ill-timed, because the February Revolution (March 8-12, new calendar) occurred just after this issue was off the news stands, and Russia became more chaotic than it usually was in those years.

The "Lifestyle Illustration" Books

Besides the occasional biography of an important illustrator, illustration fans each year can find new books containing collections of illustration art. Some deal with an individual artist (usually one specializing in science fiction and fantasy book covers, it seems), others feature multiple artists dealing in a common genre -- again, often science fiction and fantasy.

Over the past few years Taschen has published many art books, including a series titled "Illustration Now." I don't own any copies because I don't like most of their content, being more a fan of 1895-1965 vintage illustration.

Speaking of which, there are now two books edited by Rian Hughes full of works by British and American illustrators:

Lifestyle Illustration of the 60s appeared in 2011 and Lifestyle Illustration of the 50s came out in 2013.

I find the titles puzzling. What the books contain are mostly full-color romance story illustrations that appeared in British magazines for women. Page after page is filled with beautiful women paired with handsome men in various situations related in one way or another to romance. This is pretty limiting, yet the illustrators were somehow able to introduce enough variety that I didn't notice any two pictures being identical. Along with this, a few fashion and even furniture/decor illustrations can be found; I suppose this tiny intrusion was taken to justify the "Lifestyle" part of the titles. I think a more descriptive title might have been "Romance Story Illustrations of the XXs," but maybe there were good reasons for not using something like that.

American illustrators' work is included because publication rights were sold following publication in American magazines. In that way, British readers got to see the likes of Coby Whitmore, Jon Whitcomb, Joe DeMers, Edwin Georgi and Lynn Buckham (who actually worked in England for a while).

David Roach, in his introduction to the 1950s collection, notes that early in that decade British illustrators' work lagged behind what the Americans were doing in terms of style and pizazz. He contends that the Brits had pretty well caught up with the Yanks by 1960. I agree that the cream of American illustrators noticeably outclassed the British for much of the 50s, and disagree that they had caught up by the end. The gap had considerably narrowed in my judgment, but hadn't quite closed.

The 1960s book is interesting in that, despite the romance story focus, the shift in illustration fashion to modernist designs where representationalism was degraded is clearly documented. By 1970 the silly succession to classical illustration was now (and remains) dominant.

Walter Beach Humphrey: Murals and Magazine Covers

Useful though the Internet is, sometimes it can be frustrating trying to locate information about artists and illustrators I wish to write about. And so it is with Walter Beach Humphrey (1892-1966). A brief Wikipedia entry is here, and a few more details can be found here.

It seems that Humphrey was an Ivy League guy, being a member of Dartmouth College's class of 1914. He then was at New York's Art Students League to complete his training under Frank DuMond. After that, he had a successful career as an illustrator and mural painter for the next quarter century or so. However, his career after the early 1940s is essentially a mystery to me for now, though he is known to have taught.

Humphrey's style was hard-edge, something of a necessity for mural work. Yet he was able to ease off ever so slightly, resulting in works that are not overly stark and held together well.

Gallery

"It's the thieving federals again" - story illustration
I'm guessing this was made around 1920, but can't be sure because the subject is historical, not contemporary, so I can't use dress for estimation purposes.

Saturday Evening Post cover 13 January 1923
A blurred image, but I include it to show that Humphrey did hit the illustration Big Time.

Liberty cover - 16 August 1924
Humphrey was one of the early cover artists for Liberty magazine.

Liberty cover - 17 October 1925

Liberty cover - 7 November 1925
Ever loyal, Humphrey hints that this scene has to do with a Dartmouth College football game (note the Dartmouth green uniform and the letter "D" on the girl's pennant).

Reflection - 1929

Memories

Scaring Mother

The Elks Magazine cover - July, 1931

Section of Dartmouth College mural
A useful background link to a Dartmouth Review article on the mural (controversial, especially for those practicing political correctness) is here.

Patriotic Montage mural - ca. 1943