Coping With the Great Depression: John Newton Howitt

Note: I drafted this on 13 June for later posting. Now it turns out Illustration Magazine's just-released Issue No. 49 has a large article on John Newton Howitt. Below is what I wrote in June regarding Howitt.

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John Newton Howitt (1885-1958) is an illustrator not widely known these days. But I'd place him in the "successful" category because he made the American illustration Big Time by doing occasional cover art for the Saturday Evening Post, the leading general-interest magazine in his time.

A reasonably detailed biographical sketch can be found here, a Web site devoted to illustrators working for "pulp" magazines. Printed on cheap, pulp (thick, with rough surfaces) paper, they flourished during the Great Depression of the 1930s specializing in fiction topics such as crime, science-fiction, cowboys, romance, terror, adventure and such.

So what was an illustrator for "slick" (smooth, quality paper) magazines such as the Post doing in the pulp field? He was trying to maintain his livelihood during the Depression, and the pulp market was doing well thanks to escapist subjects and cheap news stand prices. Some better-known illustrators such as Tom Lovell and Walter Baumhofer got their start in pulps, eventually graduating to the slicks. So Howitt was an exception, doing slicks work before and after the Depression and pulps and the occasional slick during those trying years.

Howitt signed his Fine Art and slicks illustrations with his full name. His pulp work either wasn't signed at all or else he simply used the initial "H" to identify it. Apparently many of the originals of his pulp work were destroyed. One source stated the Howitt himself did it, another claims it was his wife.

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Buried Treasure - (Cream of Wheat breakfast cereal advertisement) - 1909

The Symphony - ca. 1925
This might be a Fine Arts painting, but could just as well be art for advertising radios.

Probably a Fine Arts painting - 1910s?

Mother and children illustration - late 1920s

Farm family - probably an illustration from the 1930s

Holland's Magazine cover - May, 1929

Horror Stories cover - January 1935

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Terror Tales cover - November 1935
Howitt's work was noticeably better than that found on many pulp covers (Baumhofer and a few others excepted).

Saturday Evening Post cover, 20 September 1936

Saturday Evening Post cover, 19 October 1940
The joke here is that the sailor sees a photo of a soldier (!!!) falling out of the purse.

Illustrations by Fish

Anne Harriet Fish Sifton (1890-1964), is best known as "Fish" -- that's her maiden name and how she usually signed her cartoons and illustrations. She was English, but well known in the United States due to her cover art and cartoons in Vanity Fair magazine. Biographical information is sketchy, but various bits of information can be found here, here and here.

Her style included considerable simplification and exaggeration of the human form, but in the interests of overall image design and emphasizing her witty take on high society with its all-too-human undertones. It's interesting that this style that strikes us today as being very 1920s was actually present by around 1915.

Some images below are copyrighted by Condé Nast publications; it seems they will be happy to sell you prints of Vanity Fair covers by Fish.

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Photo of Anne Fish

Vanity Fair cover - November, 1916

Vanity Fair cover art (detail) - December, 1921

Awful Weekends (part of a series)
Click to enlarge so that captions can be read.

Vanity Fair cover - February, 1926

Vanity Fair cartoon workup (via Bonhams) - 1923

Abdulla cigarettes ad art - 1927

James W. Williamson's Charming Ford Model A Ads

The Ford Model A advertisement shown above was illustrated by James W. Williamson (1899-1978), a self-taught artist with a degree from Yale.

Ford had been building its famed Model T for many years, but by the mid-1920s its market share was being eroded by more modern competing cars. Eventually, even the stubborn Henry Ford had to concede that the T had to be replaced, as this Wikipedia entry indicates.

The new Ford required a new marketing approach, so in 1927 the famous N.W. Ayer & Son advertising agency from Philadelphia was hired to create advertising for the forthcoming Model A. In those days, most car ads did not use photography, so an artist needed to be selected. Henry's son Edsel was impressed by Williamson's work and had him hired as the advertising artist.

Williamson had a successful career stretching from the 1920s to the 1950s, though it was at its peak during the 20s and 30s. I could find little regarding him on the Internet aside from this biographical note. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1984, but their Web site contains no biography of him.

One thing that interests me regarding Ford Model A advertisements is that, although it was a low-priced car, the artwork usually showed Model A's in upper-class settings (note the floatplane in the image above). Moreover, many of the ads were placed in women's-interest magazines.

As for Williamson, he used a clean style and included charming, sometimes humorous details in his illustrations. And 85 years later, they provide a window into the life of a different, and possibly better, time.

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* * * * * Cross-posted at Car Style Critic * * * * *

Dorothy Hood's 1950s, 1960s Fashion Illustration

My training in commercial art included a course in fashion illustration. The instructor, Irwin Caplan, who I wrote about here, would bring issues of the Sunday New York Times to class for our inspection and inspiration.

The Times in those days was filled with advertisements for department and women's apparel stores. Around 1960 those included Macy's, B. Altman, Arnold Constable and Bergdorf Goodman. Perhaps the ads Caplan touted the most were from Lord & Taylor, featuring the illustrations of Dorothy Hood (1902-1970). Not surprising, because Hood had been at the top of the New York fashion illustration world for a long time and was still going strong.

There seems to be little about Hood on the Internet, but some biographical information can be found here and here. The latter source mentions that due to a 1950s accident affecting her right arm, she trained herself to illustrate using her left hand ... without noticeably affecting the results.

Most fashion illustrations in newspapers and even magazines in the 1950s and 60s were printed in black and white; run-of-paper color is common now, but rare then. Illustrators usually opted for brushwork and ink or watercolor washes to quickly produce effective views of featured merchandise.

Here are some examples of Hood's work for Lord & Taylor from those days.

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Henry Soulen, Mural-Style Illustrator

Henry James Soulen (1888-1965) was an illustrator whose work was published in major magazines, yet he is virtually unknown today. Short biographical links are here and here.

Soulen's style included bright colors, limited depth, and cloisonnist outlining of his subject matter. These traits are commonly found in murals painted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Dancing at the Waldorf

Great War scene

The Three Musketeers

The Ukulele Player

Flowers of Gold

From "One Man and One Woman"

Here is an example of a problem faced by me and other bloggers who make use of unfamiliar images found on the Internet. Not having seen the original art or even a printed reproduction, I have no sure way of telling what the original coloration was like. Above are two versions of "The Parade." The upper version has more naturalistic colors. But I wonder if the image was scanned from a magazine; illustration colors were and are altered purposefully or otherwise during the publication process. The lower version has better resolution (you can see more impasto brushwork: click to enlarge), yet the colors don't strike me as realistic for a German scene. If any reader knows for certain what the original colors were, please post a comment.

Sergius Hruby: Sensual Symbolist

There's not a lot regarding Sergius Hruby (1869-1943) on the Internet other than examples of his artwork. Some biographical information is here, and a much shorter mention is here.

In brief, his Czech name to the contrary, he was born in Vienna, studied art and made his career there.

Hruby can best be classified as a Symbolist of the Art Nouveau variety. Many of the images he created featured nude or partly-clad women and were in the form of illustrations for printed reproduction. What I find interesting is that his style changed little over most of his career, unlike many other artists of his generation who chased modernist artistic fashions.

It's also worth noting that Hruby's works draw one's interest because, in part, they are unconventional. That is, the humans he depicts are done in representational style with little in the way of simplification and none of the distortion often found in mainstream symbolist works. From that basis, he places those humans in strange situations using dramatic or unusual compositions.

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Apotheosis

Ungleige Seelen (Different Souls)
That's a rough translation, the title might also be rendered as "Unequal Souls" or even something more freely put in English.

Die Verspottung Christi (The Mocking of Christ)
Click on it to enlarge.

I'm not sure what the title is for this painting. The image I captured from the Internet had the tag "Oil on Wood," which would be the description of materials used to make it. This strikes me as being an earlier work, though I might easily be completely wrong. Nevertheless, it's pleasing.

Anbetung der Natur (Nature Worship) - 1932
At least this one is dated, and was made when he was in his early sixties, still evoking 1900 sensibilities.

Alexander Leydenfrost: Illustrating Technical Stuff

American readers born before, say, 1950 might recall leafing through copies of Life Magazine or other publications and coming across illustrations by Alexander Leydenfrost (1888-1961). What most viewers didn't realize was that Leydenfrost was an Hungarian Baron who moved to the United States in 1923 to escape the aftermath of the Great War. By 1930 he was working as an industrial designer for Norman Bel Geddes, and at the end of the decade moved into illustration full-time. Those and other details can be found in this short Wikipedia entry.

After a fling in Planet Stories, a science-fiction magazine, Leydenfrost built his illustration career depicting current and futuristic machines and settings. This was not a large step away from making certain kinds of industrial design presentations. However, he had an artistic sense that set him apart from those simply skilled in product rendering, which is why his scenes were usually dramatic and halfway believable even if they dealt with future possibilities.

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Brooklyn Battery Tunnel - 1950

Fleeing after atomic attack - Pageant Magazine - February 1951

Science on the March - Popular Mechanics Magazine - January 1952
This was a spread in the magazine's 50th anniversary issue.  Click on the illustration to enlarge.

Future Dirigible - ca. 1944

B-26 Bomber - 1942 or 1943

Pennsylvania Railroad calendar illustration - 1945