Ernest Hamlin Baker Portraits for Time Magazine Covers

Ernest Hamlin Baker (1889-1975) was a prolific illustrator best known for his portraits work for Time Magazine covers. I wrote about him here, and David Apatoff provides useful information about him here.

Unfortunately, there otherwise seems to be little background material about him on the Internet, if a brief Google search is any guide.

Below are examples of Time cover portrait art, mostly from the 1940s and World War 2.

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Dwight Eisenhower
Probably painted when he was President.

Benito Mussolini - 1941
The Italian dictator.

General Sir Harold Alexander
When in command of the Mediterranean theatre for Britain.

General Erwin Rommel - c. 1942
The Desert Fox.

Winston Churchill - 1949
For Time's "Man of the Half-Century" cover that appeared around the start of 1950.

Henry Ford - 1941
Showing Ford Motor Company's gearing up for war production.

Alfred P. Sloan
Chairman of General Motors.  Again having to do with conversion from cars to weapons.

George Marshall
Probably when he was Secretary of State.

Juan and Evita Peron
Argentina's Dictator.

Oveta Culp Hobby - 1944
Col. Hobby led the Woman's Army Corps during the war.

Groucho Marx - 1951
The comedian.  A slightly colorized version of this drawing (or a nearly identical one) was on Time's last 1951 cover.

Philip Castle's "Aviation" Airbrush Art

Philip Castle (b. 1942 or 1943) is a British illutrator best known for film posters.  I know him better for his somewhat not-safe-for-work airbrush images of aircraft, women, and the occasional automobile.   Biographical information is skimpy on the Internet, as exemplified by his brief Wikipedia entry.

There are some interviews of him, but they largely deal with those movie posters.  However, in one he mentioned that nowadays it is easy to create digital images of the kind he labored over using his airbrush.

It is also worth noting that although Castle is an Englishman, most of the images below are of American aircraft and cars.  Perhaps that's because their designs are flashier than their British equivalents.

Many images below might not be safe for viewing at work in an office setting.

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Castle's classic poster for "Clockwork Orange."

Cover of a book I once owned.  Featured are F-15 fighters.

Another cover, this with a Navy F/A-18

This shows aircraft from a variety of eras.  These include a British Handley Page Heyford biplane bomber and a Vought F6U Cutlass fighter.

Chromed young woman.

Six-armed woman with B-1 bombers, a moth and the rear fender of a 1957 Dodge.

Fragment of a larger work.  The aircraft are F-16s.

Winged ladies and B-1 bombers.

This features French content.  The car is a postwar Delahaye 175 by Saoutchik.  Aircraft are French bombers of the 1930s.  Nearest is a Farman 221.  At the top, an Amiot 143.  Others are harder to identify.

Frederic Remington's Military Art

Frederic Sackrider Remington (1861-1909), along with Charles Russell (who I wrote about
here), was a leading American artist of the late 1800s Frontier West.   I rate Remington slightly higher than Russell in artistic merit.  Perhaps that was because he had had some art training during his year at Yale and later at New York's Art Students League, whereas Russell was self-taught.  Remington's lengthy Wikipedia entry is here.

A favorite Remington subject was armed conflict by U.S. Cavalry along with groups of various kinds of civilians such as trappers of settlers opposed by the Indians.  The present post features images of army personnel -- mostly cavalry, but also infantry and Indian Scouts employed by the army.

As best I can tell, the battle scenes below are imaginary.  However, he was out west as a young man and therefore familiar with soldiers, Indians, landscapes and other details.

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A Detachment of the Fifteenth Infantry

Trooper of the Plains
Another character study.

Call the Doctor
More sketch or study than a finished work, Remington nevertheless signed this.

On the Southern Plains
Cavalry charge, the troopers with raised pistols.

The Advance Guard: the Ambush
Troopers in big trouble.

Dismounted - 4th Cavalry troopers moving the horses
Here cavalry troopers are acting as dragoons -- mounted infantry.  They form a line along the background ridge while their horses are removed from the scene by other troopers.  The ratio shown here is three detached horses to each minder.

Pony Tracks in the Buffalo Trails
This detachment is pursuing some Indians who must have caused trouble.  They seems to have followed buffalo herd tracks to help disguise their own horses' tracks.  But Indian Scouts are on the job of sorting pony from buffalo tracks.

The Scout: Friends or Foes?
Another Indian Scout.

J.C. Leyendecker's Women

J.C. (Joseph Christian) Leyendecker (1874-1951) was extremely popular during his long heyday as an illustrator thanks to a trademark painting style.  Eventually, that style fell from fashion: I wrote about his late works here.  I also wrote about his use of lighting here.  His Wikipedia entry is here.

Leyendecker was best known for his Saturday Evening Post magazine covers and his art for Arrow Collar and Kuppenheimer menswear advertisements.  For commercial and to some degree personal reasons Leyendecker tended to portray men.  However, he also included fetching young women as subjects when required.

This post presents some of his portrayals of women, showing variations in his technique from near the turn of the 20th century to the early 1930s.  Note that some of the women seem similar.  That might be because he often used Phyllis Frederic as a model for the later half of that period.

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A study from 1896.  At about age 22 he already was using white paint applied over the painting surface to create a background or setting effect.

Magazine illustration from 1905.  His signature style was beginning around that time, but is apparent here only in his treatment of the lady's dress and some of the background.

A 1906 Easter illustration.  Again, little sense of his style because in part he needed to satisfy art directors who expected conventional appearance.

Even as late as 1923 in this Saturday Evening Post cover art Leyendecker painted the subject matter smoothly.  Note the depiction of cracks on the bowl in the foreground ... interesting detail.

A photo I took years ago showing a detail of a 1920 painting from the Kelly Collection of important illustrations.  Click on this image to enlarge greatly and observe Leyendecker's signature style up close.  His drawing has a sculptural feeling.  This and the regular brushwork on color overlays comprise much of that style.

Detail from another illustration.

And another.  The woman's neck and shoulders seem unnatural to me, but perhaps got lost in the full illustration.

A study squared for transfer to the finished illustration.

Another detail from a larger work.  Here there are more dark structural lines than usual, perhaps because this is from 1910 when his style was fairly new and still evolving.

Kuppenheimer advertisment art.

1932 Arrow ad art.  The models are Phyllis Frederic and Brian Donlevy -- who had a long career in movies.  She is painted smoothly, not in the style shown in the detail images above.

Studies of details in the previous image.

Some Bob Peak Pre- Movie Poster Illustrations

Robert M. (Bob) Peak (1927-1992) was one of America's most successful illustrators from the late 1950s until his death.  Eons ago when I was a commercial art student, the two illustrators that impressed me the most were Bernie Fuchs and Bob Peak.

I last wrote about Peak nearly ten years ago.  His brief Wikipedia entry is here.  Some information regarding his later years' technique when he was doing a good deal of airbrush work is here.

In 2009 illustration maven David Apatoff wrote about Peak here, mentioning:

"But in the 1960s, Peak caught fire and began turning out radically different work. His line work had roots in the Viennese Secessionist movement (particularly Schiele and Klimt) and in the great Rene Bouche, but Peak's hot, fluorescent color combinations were unprecedented; his extreme angles, cinematic style, and space age dynamism were blazingly original....

"Peak's salad days in the 1960s were a remarkable, vibrant period, but he was too hot not to cool down. As Peak matured, he remained commercially successful but his innovations came fewer and farther between. He had a lucrative career making movie posters that seem to me to be repetitive and uninspired, the type of art that might be sold on vacation cruise ships."

I'm not as negative as Apatoff with respect to Peak's movie poster era because much of what he did was striking.  But it was repetitive due perhaps to a need to preserve a stylistic image helpful to his career and perhaps because film company publicity departments expected him to use his signature poster style.

And I agree with Apatoff that Peak's best work was done during the pre- movie poster years.  Examples from around that time are presented below.

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Dobbs Hat advertisement illustration.  The most interesting part is the background. Note the colors Peak used on the woman's face.

TWA airline illustration.  This is the illustration style that emerged in the years around 1960 that impressed me so much when I was a student.

A spread from a Sports Illustrated magazine article of a hunting excursion by the Shah of Iran.  Click on the image to enlarge.

Detail from another TWA advertisement.  That's Paris' Alexandre III bridge.

I don't know the source, but it's a fine example of his work from that era.

Story illustration from Cosmopolitan magazine, February 1964 issue.

Interesting use of color juxtaposed with linear elements.

Very strong colors here, but details are a little fuzzy because this image I found on the Web was probably enlarged from a smaller one.

Some Coles Phillips type of color merging.

Finally a Time magazine cover portrait illustration.  Plenty of drawing lines plus watercolor or maybe colored inks or other media.

Maxfield Parrish 1940s Landscapes

Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) was a successful illustrator and Fine Arts painter whose reputation sagged late in his career and has since recovered fairly well.  His Wikipedia entry is here, and I wrote about him here and here.

His illustrations often included landscape backgrounds, and eventually he began painting pure landscapes (no human figures).  Often these were turned into prints or used as calendar art.  Most of the images below that I found on the Internet seem to be scans of such prints.  Therefore, they lack the strong impact that his paintings have when seen in person.

As best I can tell from my reference material, Parrish started  painting such landscapes around 1930.  For this post, I feature some he made during the 1940s.

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Unfinished painting
But first, a word regarding his technique.  Parrish took a long time to complete a painting.  Not counting pre-painting preparation (composition, color studies and such), he often began with a monochrome underpainting, as can be found in the right side of the image above.  To that he added layers of oil glazing and perhaps regular oil paints layer by layer with time out for each layer to dry -- perhaps weeks, depending on the nature of the layer.  Thanks to this practice, he worked on several paintings at any given time, adding paint to those whose upper layers had dried.

Dusk - 1942
Parrish was noted for his treatment of skies under various (often dramatic) conditions.

Winter Moonlit Night - 1942
Note the green colored snow.  Frederic Remington painted a series of Western nocturnes during the early 1900s, many of which featured green grounds.  I don't know if Parrish was familiar with Remington's nocturnes or if he hit upon the use of greens by his own observations.

Afterglow - 1947
Another winter scene, but not quite a nocturne.

Hunt Farm - 1948
Many Parrish landscapes include structures.

Winter Sunrise - 1949
Even here, a few houses can be found.  Note the use of near-opposite colors (blue-purple and gold) that domiate this scene, adding to its drama.