More Illustrations and Sketches by Albert Brenet

I wrote about Albert Victor Eugène Brenet (1903-2005) here. He was a popular French illustrator and marine painter for many years (French Wikipedia entry here).

He enjoyed going on-site to capture the scenes he wanted, acquiring a sketchy style that he would sometimes use in more formal works and advertising art. Below are some examples.

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Le Train Bleu - album cover
The Train Bleu was an express train that whisked tourists to the French Riviera. Milhaud wrote the score for a ballet using it as its setting. The illustration was probably made for other purposes and later used for the album. Below is a similar illustration by Brenet.

Train Bleu leaving Gare de Lyon
This railroad station is used for trains heading to Provence and other destinations. The illustration used for the album cover shows Train Bleu unloading in Antibes, or perhaps an imaginary, evocative station.

Basilique Saint-Marc de Venise - c.1960

Mechaniciens travailant sur un Thunderjet - c.1954
The Armée de l'Air used American F-84s during the early 1950s.

Directing armored car convoy

Fuelling a Constellation
Air France flew Constellations in the 1950s before the Jet Age.

Imperial Airways poster - 1930s
A poster done in a sketchy style. Perhaps this was expected of French illustrators.

La preparation de l'hydravion

La wagon restaurant
A dining car scene, probably for a railroad client.

How Much Did Dean Cornwell's Style Change?

Dean Cornwell (1892-1960) was one of the most outstanding American illustrators of his day. I wrote an "Up-Close" post about him here, and here I observed that changing illustration fashions forced him to alter his style by the 1940s and 50s -- a change for the worse, in my opinion. Between his interesting, bold, painterly style of the 1920s and his late work, Cornwell spent a good deal of time and effort as a painter of murals, and requirements for mural painting also affected his illustration style to some degree.

But it seems I need to change my mind ... a little, at least. Early this year this book about Cornwell was published. It contains large details of some Cornwell illustrations that indicate he didn't change his style as completely as I had assumed. Chalk some of that up to the fact Internet images tend to be fairly small, and a large painting reduced to 600 by 800 pixels, say, loses a good deal of detail.

Below are some images of Cornwell's work to illustrate my point regarding style continuity. All can be enlarged by clicking on them, and a few are very large. I note the latter in the captions.

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From "The Desert Healer" - 1922
An example of Cornwell's 1920s style. Brushwork is bold and visible aside from certain details that are smoothly rendered.

From "Sergeant of Chasseurs" - Cosmopolitan, April 1929
The face of the girl in the red cloche hat is smoothly painted, but most of the rest features Cornwell's usual style. Click on the image for significant enlargement.

From "The Lady Said Goodbye" - 1941
Following fashion, Cornwell used a more "hard edge" approach in this illustration. The woman's face, hands, leg, scarf and dress lack the painterly touch. Ditto the brim of the man's hat.

Couple above stream - c. 1938
I'm not sure about this illustration's date. The woman's hair style could be 1936-49 or perhaps earlier, and her dress is pre-1940. She and her accessories are not rendered in Cornwell's painterly style, though much of the rest of the illustration is.

From "The Robe" - 1947
I used this illustration in the earlier post where I showed how Cornwell's style had changed to suit the times. However, as in the previous two images, we see that his adjusted style is mostly for the main subjects. Backgrounds and other details bear evidence of his earlier technique. Click on the image for significant enlargement.

From "The Robe" (detail) - 1947
Another illustration from the series. The cavorting Romans in the foreground as well as much of the setting recall his earlier work.

"Fara Swears Revenge" from "The Big Fisherman" - 1948
Another example where parts of the illustration followed Cornwell's earlier practice. Click on the image for significant enlargement.

Land of Tropical Splendor - c. 1950
This was done for a Colombian fruit promotion. I'm not at all sure of its date. This is a case where very little of the classical Cornwell style can be found. Click on the image for significant enlargement.

Dying Magazines and the Fall of Traditional Illustration

Leif Peng had an interesting 26 October 2011 post on his Today's Inspiration blog regarding the decline and death of some general-interest magazines that had supported what I'll call traditional illustration.

Such magazines were called "slicks" because they were printed on smooth paper instead of cheaper newsprint or rough-textured "pulp" paper. Many of these magazines had circulations in the millions of copies when the U.S. population ranged from around 63 million in 1890 to about 180 million in 1960 (the number now is more than 320 million).

The archetypical general-interest magazine was the Saturday Evening Post, whose content was a mix of short stories and non-fiction articles, the former being decorated by images from famous illustrators. Covers also used illustration, the two most prolific cover illustrators being J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell.

The advent of radio in the 1920s had no noticeable effect on circulation of "slicks," and the most prominent ones also weathered the Great Depression of the 1930s. What brought them down was television, following the end of the 1948-1952 TV station license moratorium resulting in a surge of new television stations rapidly spreading across the United States.

Below is a listing of prominent magazines with their prime publication lifespans.

Saturday Evening Post -- 1897-1963 (as a weekly publication)

Collier's -- 1888-1957 (the Post's main competitor)

The American Magazine -- 1906-1956

Liberty -- 1924-1950

McCall's -- 1973-2002

Ladies' Home Journal -- 1883-2014 (as a weekly or bi-weekly)

Life -- 1936-1972 (Time, Inc. version)

Look -- 1937-1971 (like Life, was photo oriented)

I included Look Magazine because it is another good example of a mass-circulation publication that failed to survive very far beyond the 1960s. McCall's was a magazine for women that included short stories illustrated by many of the top names in the field, including Bernie Fuchs. The American and Liberty were lesser general-interest magazines. The Time Incorporated version of Life (they bought the title from an existing magazine) was primary photograph-oriented. But when dealing with subjects where good photos were unavailable, leading illustrators were brought in to provide images.

Joe De Mers: Mainstream 1950s Illustrator

Joe De Mers (1910-1984) was a leading illustrator of fiction in major American magazines -- he signed his last name in two parts, but it is often combined as "DeMers" in many references.

I didn't notice any useful biography on a brief Google search, but I can report this: He was born in San Diego, trained in Los Angeles' Chouinard and then at the Brooklyn Museum. Worked in Hollywood, but his main career was with the famed Cooper Studio in New York. He retired to Hilton Head, South Carolina.

His style was similar to that of Coby Whitmore and several others active in the 1950s. Such illustrations typically offered only enough background and stage-setting details to provide context. Featured were the subject person or persons, often as only heads and shoulders. Media was usually gouache or casein, these allowing for rapid work and lack of the messiness that oil paints might cause when works are transported.

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De Mers did some pin-up work while building his career. This was in an Esquire calendar for March 1948.

The whole thing as seen before reproduction.

From "The Invisible Bride" - Ladies' Home Journal, May 1954.

Note the spare staging.

De Mers adds some distortion to the tables in the foreground.

I'm thinking this last image is from the late 1950s or early 60s, given the Bernie Fuchs - inspired style change.

Dorothy Hood, Fashion Illustrator

This is probably the least-informative post I've ever done. That's because I can't seem to find anything on the Internet or in my reference material in the way of a biography of Dorothy Hood (1918-1984).

That strikes me as rather strange because she was the ace fashion illustrator for the famous Lord & Taylor store in New York in the 1950s and 1960s.

A couple of years ago I wrote about Irwin Caplan, a well-known cartoonist who taught fashion art back when I was in art school. Caplan regularly brought a copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times to the classroom so that we could paw through it and see what the top fashion illustrators were doing. Since Lord & Taylor advertised heavily in the Sunday Times, we got to see a lot of Hood's work.

Somewhere I read that at one point Hood damaged her drawing hand and had to learn to draw with the other one. But I can't seem to locate that source either, so take it as hearsay.

All I can do for now is show some examples of her work. Fashion art (and photography) have changed since her time, not necessarily for the better.

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From 1954

From 1958

From 1958

From 1964

From 1964

From 1964

From 1965

From 1964

Fritz Willis' Non-Pinups

Fritz Willis (1907-1979) was a first-rate pinup artist who did other kinds of illustration earlier in his career. But even then, his focus was on beautiful young women.

For more information about him and discussions regarding his work along with examples (some of which I present below), you can link here, here, here, here and here.

I get the impression that Willis might have been a bit more interested in his pinup's faces, rather than their bodies. That's because he sometimes painted heads that are too large compared to the rest of the body. You can check this if you're interested by Googling on Willis and then clicking on Images.

Here are examples of Fritz Willis' illustration art, mostly of the rare, non-pinup variety.

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Setting the stage, here are two pinups painted in Willis' mature style.

A story illustration, but I don't have the source.
UPDATE: A reader reports that this illustration is from the Saturday Evening Post story "The Airborne Female," in a December 1956 issue.

Two story spreads from Collier's Magazine

Story illustration from Saturday Evening Post -- 22 November 1958.

More unsourced story illustrations. Willis worked on full-color advertisements (fairly rare in the 1940s and 50s) and illustrated for major "slicks" such as the Post and Collier's. By these criteria, he was successful even before he drifted into art for pinup calendars.

He also did cover art for Ice Follies programs for many years.

The cover of a how-to book Willis did for Walter Foster.

July 1947 page for Esquire magazine, an early step towards pinup art.

I include this for its simplified brushwork -- not typical Willis.

Finally, a near-pinup bathing suit image.

In the Beginning: Coby Whitmore

Maxwell Coburn (Coby) Whitmore (1913-1988) is considered by many -- including me -- as one of the great illustrators of the period 1950-1965. Biographical links are here and here. I briefly mentioned him here.

Like nearly all artists, it took Whitmore a while to settle into a mature, characteristic style. Below, I feature examples of his earlier work. These images were competently done, but do not stand out from works of other illustrators from that era. Nevertheless, his work was already appearing in major magazines, and by the mid-1950s Coby Whitmore had truly become the Coby Whitmore we know.

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Typical Whitmore illustrations from his mature period
The man in the upper image strikes me as looking a lot like William F. Buckley, founder of National Review.

Advertisement from around 1942
Whitmore is already adding a dab of the risqué.

From around 1944
I don't know the source, but it's probably from an advertisement or perhaps a story. During World War 2 women were used to ferry aircraft from place to place around the country. A few might have been test pilots who checked out newly-built aircraft. None, so far as I know, were test pilots of the classical kind who wrung out prototype airplanes. As long as I'm being picky, pilots almost always enter the cockpit from the left side of the aircraft, not the right, as pictured here.

Saturday Evening Post story illustration - 8 December 1945
The woman's pose echoes the one from around 1942, above.

Cosmopolitain cover, July 1946
Whitmore did a number of covers for Cosmo in the early post-war years.

Advertisement - 1947
The car in the background seem oddly old-fashioned -- late 1930s styling. But Whitmore was a car guy, and must have had his reasons for including that vintage.

Story illustration - 1948

Illustration for Schlitz Beer advertisement - c. 1949
This image and the one above it include plenty of background detail, something unusual for Whitmore. But in the late 1940s, many art directors expected it.

Illustration for Arrow Shirt advertisement - 1949

Saturday Evening Post cover - 5 January 1952
At last, Whitmore gets to seriously combine his love of cars and beautiful women. The styling is imaginary, though the basic shapes are early-1950s.