Leslie Thrasher: Not Quite a Rockwell

A while ago I posted about Liberty magazine, a second-tier American general-interest magazine published 1924-1950, mentioning that "Liberty's cover artists, while entirely competent, were seldom in the absolute front rank of their day."

One cover artist included was Leslie Thrasher (1889-1936), who entered into a man-killing contract to provide the magazine with weekly covers for a five-year period. He managed this by doing a long, continuing saga of a young family using himself as the model for the dad.

Thrasher also painted illustrations for advertisements and Saturday Evening Post covers, the Post being the leading general-interest magazine of the day. So he was no second-rate artist, even though his hurried Liberty covers seldom added to his reputation.

Some of his Post covers can be found here. Brief biographical notes are here and here. Another, probably mistaken, take on the Liberty contract by Norman Rockwell can be found here.

Below are examples of Thrasher's cover illustrations.

Gallery

Saturday Evening Post cover - 8 June 1912
Thrasher was young when Post saw fit to put his work on its cover.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 12 January 1924
A Post cover from shortly before Liberty was launched.

Liberty cover - 13 December 1924
An early cover for Liberty.

Liberty cover - 27 December 1924
Two weeks later, this cover featuring a profane parrot.

Liberty cover - 27 October 1928
An example of a cover featuring a Thrasher self-portrait.

Liberty cover - 10 November 1928
That's Thrasher again, in the background struggling with a baby.

Liberty cover - 2 March 1929
Here he travels to pre-Castro Cuba.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 3 October 1936
Apparently some readers mistook this for a Norman Rockwell cover.

Saturday Evening Post cover - 16 January 1937
This appeared shortly after Thrasher died; it was probably in production and couldn't easily be pulled.

George Lepape, Golden Age Fashion Illustrator

Once upon a time, fashion illustration -- be it hand-drawn or photography -- was elegant. Quite unlike the ugly photos of strange looking models that populate both advertising and editorial content in current American fashion-related magazines.

For example, consider Georges Alexandre Adrien Lepape (1887-1971), a mainstay of French fashion illustration from around 1910-1930. His Wikipedia entry (in French) is here. English-language blog posts devoted to him are here and here. A lengthy French post is here.

Lapape's style is regarded as influenced by Japanese prints -- flat areas and thin linework, heavily design oriented.

Lapape married around the time his career was launched, and he had a daughter. For some reason, he seems to have ceased being active in fashion illustration by the very early 1930s, if images found on the Internet are any clue. He is known to have built a house by the Riviera, and died near Châteaudun, southwest of Chartres.

Gallery

Photo of Lepape
Dressed to the nines.

Pochoir from Les Choses de Paul Poiret - 1911
This publication for the famed couturier launched Lepape's career in fashion illustration.

Vogue (USA) cover - 15 January 1919

Vanity Fair cover - December 1919

L'eventail d'or - Gazette du Bon Ton - March 1920

Les Modes Élégants - fashion spread - 1922

Vogue cover - 1 January 1925
Interesting Voisin car, distorted perspective.

Vogue cover - November 1927

Vogue (USA) cover - 1 May 1928
Tall, narrow skyscrapers, tall, narrow lady.  Very 1920s.

'L'Initiation vénitienne' par Henri de Régnier - 1929

Vogue (France) cover - November 1930
Apparently a late fashion illustration by Lepape.

Brynolf Wennerberg and His Smiling Women

Gunnar Brynolf Wennerberg (1866-1950) was born in Sweden, but made a successful career elsewhere, mostly in Germany. His Wikipedia entries are only in Swedish and German as of the time this post was drafted. You probably can have your computer translate from either language. However, differences in syntax with English make for difficult reading in places -- though you ought to grasp most of the meaning.

Wennerberg was skilled at drawing and painting smiling women. Moreover, most of the images I've found on the Web have highly natural-looking subjects. This is even though female makeup and grooming fashions, particularly in the 1920s and 30s, required some other illustrators' results to seem odd to us.

Beyond his ability to portray, Wennerberg had a very nice painterly style.

Gallery

Beim Ankleiden - Käthe Berger

Costume ball scene?
Wennerberg illustrated a lot of carnival and costume ball scenes.

Der Charmeur
This might be a magazine illustration from around 1910.

Faun
A very nicely painted sketch with just enough detail to sell the scene.

In Erwartung
She is waiting, but for whom or what, I can't say.

Carnival

Morgengabe - c. 1920

Simplicissimus cover
I don't have the date for this, but between 1910 and 1915 shouldn't be far off.

Dancer

Dancer

Dancer
Three paintings, each featuring a Tänzerin.

Clothilde Eggerer - 1939
For once, a woman who is not smiling. Because of the war?

Spritzig - c. 1930

Portrait sketch - 1935
I think this is especially well done.  The guy could really paint.

Rudolph Belarski's Pulp Art

Rudolph Belarski (1900-1983) was one of many illustrators whose early career was spent painting covers for the many "pulp" (low-quality paper) magazines that were especially popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s thanks to their low prices and ability to distract readers from the hard times. A short biographical sketch is here.

Belarski came from Pennsylvania's coal mining country, but was able to get away to New York City and study engineering and art at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. Unlike his contemporary, Walter Baumhofer, Belarski never graduated from pulp to "slick" magazines, but he did move on to illustrating covers for paperback books.

Below are examples of his pulp work, 1928-1943.

Gallery

War Stories cover - 16 August 1928
Early Belarski cover art. It's not well done. The helmets of the (probably) American soldiers are a lot smaller than in reality, which helps to make the heads unconvincing.

Aces cover art - July 1930
This is better, though the scene is improbable -- the American pilot twisting around to fire the dead gunner's Lewis gun at a pursuing German fighter. Perhaps the magazine featured a short fiction story that included this action.

British or American soldiers attacking
Again, Belarski has trouble drawing Great War British style helmets, though these are better than in the earlier image.  The case was the same for many illustrators and fine artists, including William Orpen.

War Birds cover - June 1936
A Three Musketeers theme, though the flyers are in American planes.

Thrilling Mystery cover - November 1936
Damsel in distress. The red dress helps attract the attention of news stand browsers, a standard pulp cover practice.

Argosy Weekly cover - 8 January 1938
That airplane really interests me because it resembles the De Havilland Vampire jet fighter that first flew in 1943. Belarski's plane seems to be rocket powered.

The Phantom Detective cover - n.d.
Belarski's technique has improved considerably by the time this cover was painted -- I'm guessing it's from the end of 1930s or the early 1940s.

Charging French poilus
Probably painted in 1939 after World War 2 started but before France fell in June, 1940.  The helmets are convincing, as is the Char B1 bis tank in the background.

Flying Stories cover - Fall 1943
The geometry of the relationships of the aircraft and tracer bullet streams is haywire, but I assume the art director asked for lots of Japanese army fighters shooting, burning and otherwise keeping the USAAF B-17 occupied.

Earle Bergey: Pinups, Pulps, Paperbacks and More

Earle K. Bergey (1901-1952) earned a good deal of his living painting cover art for "pulp" (printed on really cheap paper) magazines. But there was more to him than that.

His Wikipedia entry mentions that Bergey studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for four or five years, but this more detailed source mentions that his attendance was at evening school and that there is no record of his having graduated. Nevertheless, he probably received at least a little good training. Bergey worked at the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper for a while, but then drifted into painting pinups and pulp cover art. By 1948 he also was busy doing cover art for paperback books.

Here are examples of his work.

Gallery

Starling Stories cover - May 1948
This cover is pretty standard science-fiction pulp cover fare from those good old days featuring a monster, a heroic man and a scantily-clad woman in distress. One difference is that the illustration is slightly better done than what was usually seen on sci-fi mags ten years earlier.

Fantastic Story Quarterly cover - Fall 1950
Here we have pretty much the same thing, but with a better view of the BEM (bug-eyed-monster).

Starling Stories cover - May 1951

Starling Stories cover
Two more Bergey sci-fi pulp covers. Note the similarity of the space ships diving towards the lower left corner of each cover. As for those large images of women, note that they are well done. It seems that Bergey liked to paint beautiful women and was good at it.

Thrilling Wonder Stories cover - December 1950
The lion in the background is also convincingly done.

Pinup - mid-1930s

Thrilling Love cover - March 1948
Bergey offers this face that's part glamour and part girl-next-door -- a well-dressed version of Bettie Page.

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" paperback book cover - 1948
The postwar paperback edition of Anita Loos' best-known book.

Saturday Evening Post cover - May 25 1935
Bergey was a Philadelphia guy, so he also did a cover for the town's most famous magazine.