Jefferson Machamer: Gals, Gals, Gals Cartoonist

Thomas Jefferson Machamer (1901-1960) was a popular cartoonist from the mid-1920s through the 1940s. A brief Wikipedia entry is here, and a detailed career outline and evaluation of his work is here.

Machamer had a breezy, sketchy, distinctive style of drawing in ink that served him well. The second link above opines that the humor in the situations he depicted and the wit of his captions wasn't first-rate. I'm inclined to agree; his strong suit was his drawing style. He featured attractive young women ("gals") throughout his career, and even married one (movie actress Pauline Moore). A problem I have with this is that the gals he drew tended to look very similar if one ignores their clothing and hair style/hair color. Apparently this didn't bother his many fans.

The bottom line for me is that while I have some reservations, I basically enjoy Machamer's work. Click on those images with lots of details to enlarge.

Gallery

Judge cover - 6 August 1927
Satire on 1920s fashions for guys 'n' gals.

Judge cover - 10 March 1928
Here we get closer to Machamer's signature style.

Judge interior art

Katherine Hepburn
After Hepburn burst onto the Hollywood scene, Machamer's gals' faces underwent a change.

A representative post-Hepburn cartoon by Machamer

Gags and Gals panel - late 1930s
The fellow in the top hat in the next-to-bottom strip is a self-caricature that Machamer often included in his cartoons.

Some advice on drawing cartoon gals

Workups of gals' heads

Workups of full-figure gals

Example of Machamer landscape drawing - 1949
Look carefully and you will see a gal.

How Well Could Cézanne Draw?

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), who received little general recognition until the last decade of his life, is now credited as being the "bridge" to modernist "isms" of the early 1900s from Impressionism and various Postimpressionist styles. His career is summarized here.

His image to casual art fans is that of a reclusive, provincial bumpkin who somehow made good in terms of Modernist Establishment art history. There is some truth in this, but there was more to Cézanne than that. In the first place, he had a good pre-university classical education, being able to translate from the Latin, for instance. He was a close boyhood friend of Émile Zola, later the famous journalist and novelist. His artistic potential caught the eye of Camille Pissarro, a leading French Impressionist, who joined him on plein air painting expeditions.

At his core, Cézanne can be considered a theorist, especially where art was concerned. He theorized about color, perspective, brushwork, the basic nature of forms and other matters that became important to the likes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and other modernists who claimed that he had opened their eyes in various ways.

One thing Cézanne didn't much bother with was accurate drawing, especially of people -- something he must have considered incidental to his theory-based artistic goals. Or perhaps he didn't much bother with accurate drawing because he has limited ability in that task. Let's examine some evidence.

House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise - 1873Cézanne painted many landscapes and still lifes. This is one of his best and most famous plein air efforts from the early part of his career. One would have to see the original scene to properly evaluate how Cézanne interpreted it. But what we can see here is something solid and reasonably believable.

The Barque of Dante (after Delacroix) c. 1870-73He spent a fair amount of time in the Louvre when in Paris. Here is his copy of a Delacroix. Details are mostly omitted, but the colors and shapes of the subjects in the original are fairly well captured.

Hortense Breast Feeding Paul - c. 1873Cézanne didn't marry Hortense until 1886 when their relationship was on the skids. But he was devoted to his son, young Paul. For this painting, he did a better job of depicting people than usual.

Couple in a Garden (The Conversation) - 1872-73At about the same time, he made this painting where the people are badly done. It is likely that Cézanne did them from imagination, because he seldom paid for models.

Jeune garçon au gilet rouge - 1888-89Fifteen years later he still gets anatomy wrong. Note how elongated the boy's upper right arm is. Also, just where is the left arm's elbow? The ear seems too large or the face is too small. Cézanne was noted for spending much of his time observing rather than painting -- taking long intervals between brush strokes. But if he was observing so closely, how could he have messed up so badly what was right before his eyes?

Les joueurs de carte (The Card Players) - 1892-95Cézanne gets anatomy wrong in this, one of his most famous paintings. A charitable explanation is that he had his attention focused on other aspects of the scene, and that the men are mere props or fodder for his theoretical explorations.

So it seems that Cézanne was almost incapable of painting people properly proportioned. Now let's see what happens where painting and all his theories are stripped away and the focus is on depicting human form.

Studies - 1871-76A page of sketches. The upper female figure is convincingly done from around the waist down, and the Arab in the foreground seems solidly done. The other figures are too sketchy to evaluate.

Self-Portrait - c. 1875Another decently done job. Not a great drawing, but a good one. However, I do wonder a little regarding the size and placement of his ear.

Madame Cézanne with Hortensias - 1885I think this treatment of Hortense is the best Cézanne drawing I've ever encountered. It shows that, on occasion, he could do a good job of depicting people. All that he needed was a pencil instead of a paintbrush.

Molti Ritratti: Ellen Terry

Dame Ellen Terry (1847-1928), one of England's more important actresses in her day, had portraits painted of her by some lesser-known artists and by two famous ones. One of the famous ones, George Frederic Watts, was her first husband, marrying her shortly before her 17th birthday. They lived together less than a year. These and other details can be found in her lengthy Wikipedia entry.

The two most famous portraits of Terry are Watts' "Choosing" and Sargent's "Lady Macbeth." They are probably the best, as well. The two others by Watts strike me as a bit too smudged.

I include some photographs of Terry at various ages for comparison.

Gallery

Photo at age 16

Photo at age 33

Photo at age 43

By G.F. Watts - "Choosing"

By G.F. Watts
Paintings by Watts were made around 1864 while they were living together.

By Johnston Forbes-Robertson - 1876

By Edward Matthew Hale - Sketch of Ellen Terry at Halliford - 1881

By John Singer Sargent - sketch of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth - 1889
Note Sargent's dedication to Terry at the lower right corner.

By John Singer Sargent - Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth - 1889

By Douglas F. Robinson - 1905

By Clare Atwood - Dame Ellen Terry Aged 79 - c.1926
Atwood was a companion of Terry's daughter.

Towards the End: Picasso

In January 2011, I wrote an "In the Beginning" post (here) featuring Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who the general public still seems to regard as the genius master of Modern Art.

Recently, I've added a complementary series, "Towards the End," dealing with an artist's late, rather than early work. So now seems to be as good a time as any to add the remaining bookend to Picasso's career.

Considering that he died aged 91, it's a little unfair to select a start-point ten or even 15 years before his death. So what I did was rummage through images of paintings made after 1950, when he was nearly 70. Below are some examples from what I found.

Gallery

Dora Maar au chat - 1941
I include this painting Picasso made when he was about 60 to serve as a benchmark for the later ones. "Dora Maar with Cat" sold at auction for one of the highest prices ever.

Villa in Vallauris - 1951

Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle - 1952

The Studio - 1955

Woman in Turkish Costume Sitting in a Chair - 1955

Les pigeons, Cannes - 1957

The Rape of the Sabine Women - c. 1963

Le peintre et son modele - 1963

Grandes têtes - 1969

Tête d'homme - 1972

True to his form, Picasso never went purely abstract; each painting includes a subject or subjects potentially identifiable via the captions.

To my eye, there was no real stylistic progression or sense of direction over the 20 years covered by the example images above. This ties into the thesis of my e-book "Art Adrift" that once the elements of modernist painting had been established by around 1920, aspiring modernists and even established ones such as Picasso had no real sense of what to do next.

Ted Rand: Local Illustrator Who Made Good

Eons ago, when I was majoring in commercial art at the University of Washington, the Big Man in the Seattle illustration scene was Ted Rand (1915-2005).

There were other competent illustrators working in Seattle back in the days when the Seattle area was far from the world-class place it is now. The same can probably be accurately said for many mid-size metropolitan areas back when the nationally-known illustrators worked out of the New York City area (mostly), Chicago (to a lesser extent) and San Francisco (somewhat). Today's example features Seattle, because that's the place I knew about at the time.

Rand was the top illustrator locally in part because his work was featured in Pendleton ads that appeared in national publications. The other local guy with national cred was cartoonist Irwin Kaplan, who I wrote about here. As I mentioned in that post, Kaplan taught a fashion illustration class, and Rand appeared there once as a guest lecturer. Later on, Rand taught at Washington; too bad I missed out on that.

A biographical note on Rand is here, and a two-page obituary is here. As best I can tell, he had little or no art training beyond high school, so he must have been a "natural." Also noteworthy is that, at around age 65, he shifted professional gears to become a prolific writer and illustrator of children's books.

Gallery

The images above look like they might be two segments from a horizontal spread (note the Frederick & Nelson logotype split). Frederick's was the leading Seattle department store into the 1960s.

Rand's work appeared nationwide during the 1950s when he illustrated ads for Portland, Oregon's Pendleton.

Here are two of his book covers.

Lily Elsie: Too Beautiful to Paint?

This is one of several posts featuring show business stars active from the 1880s to around 1920. It was a period when photography and portrait painting uneasily coexisted where notable people were being depicted. On my mind is the thought that really beautiful women are better pictured in photographs than in portrait paintings.

Today's subject is Lily Elsie (1886-1962), a popular star of London musicals whose personal life ended badly, as her Wikipedia entry indicates. A website devoted to Elsie is here.

So far as I can find, there is only one portrait of Elsie painted by a leading artist, that by American expatriate James Jebusa Shannon in 1916. On the other hand, many photographic portraits were taken of Elsie, most of which seem to be publicity-related (as might be expected).

Gallery

Some photos of Elsie; yes, she really was a beauty. The final photo was taken when she was about 40 years old and still looking very good.

An illustration publicizing the 1911 show "The Count of Luxembourg." The resolution is poor, but all the versions of usable size I could find were like this.

A postcard image by Talbot Hughes.

Lily Elsie by James Jebusa Shannon, 1916.