Otis (and Dorothy) Shepard: Billbord Masters

Otis "Shep" Shepard (1894-1969) and his wife Dorothy Van Gorder Shepard (1906-2000) were important figures in American poster and billboard design. Dorothy was trained at the California School of Arts and Crafts, whereas Otis ended formal education after the fourth grade and left home at age 12 to get on with life. His art training was informal, but he had plenty of natural ability along with an active mind that allowed him to exploit it. He got involved with billboards working at Foster & Kleiser, a major West Coast firm, rising to general art director in 1923.

Otis and Dorothy were married November 8, 1929, a few days after the Wall Street Crash, and went to Europe on honeymoon where they experienced first-hand modernistic poster designs. They carried that inspiration home and Otis applied it and the use of the airbrush to a poster for Chesterfield cigarettes (see below). This success led him to go free-lance.

In 1932, not long after he took charge of the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, Philip K. Wrigley met Shepard and soon hired him as what amounted to design chief for the chewing gum company whose other interests included the Chicago Cubs baseball team and Catalina Island, near Los Angeles. Shepard was involved with everything from billboards to designing Cubs uniforms to creating architectural and design harmony for Catalina. Not bad for a man lacking formal education.

I wrote about Shepard here in 2009 on the 2Blowhards blog.

An excellent book about the Shepards was recently published. Its cover is shown above and its Amazon link is here.

A web site devoted to the Shepards and the book is here. An interview with one of the authors about the Shepards is here.

Below are (mostly) examples of their poster and billboard work.  Unless otherwise noted, the design and artwork was by Otis.

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Otis and Dorothy Christmas card - by Dorothy - 1929

Chesterfield cigarettes billboard - 1930
This launched Otis' national-level career as a billboard artist/designer.  Dorothy was used as the model.

Underwood typewriters poster by Dorothy
Besides images, Dorothy often did typography.

Doublemint chewing gum billboard

Doublemint chewing gum billboard
The Doublemint Twins theme was used for years.

Juicy Fruit chewing gum billboard

Juicy Fruit chewing gum billboard
An interesting feature is the mouth appearing on the slogan banner.

Oswald Birley, 20th Century Painter of Royals and Society

Sir Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley (1880-1952) is yet another of the surprising number of British portrait artists I've written about who managed to thrive in the 20th century when photography began to dominate even the portraiture of wealthy or titled people.

It probably helped that Birley's background included Harrow (where Churchill attended) and Trinity College, Cambridge, so he was socially acceptable to potential clients. His art training included some time spent at the Académie Julian in Paris.

A brief biographical note is here, and another one is here. Perhaps even more interesting than Birley are some of his descendants. For a dab of dirt on that subject, click here.

Although he was no John Singer Sargent or Philip de Laszlo, he was a competent portrait artist who delivered the anticipated goods to rich, famous, or royal clientelle. As you might notice regarding the images below, Birley usually portrayed his subjects from the knees or waist up, and left plenty of largely empty space around their heads.

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The Spanish Plume - 1912
A fairly early example of Birley's work.

Miss Muriel Gore in a Fortuny Dress - 1919

Portrait of a lady - 1923

Barbara Hutton - 1925
Painted when she was a teenager. For more on the life of this Woolworth heiress, click here.

George V - 1928

Ernest Rutherford - 1932
The scientist shown with some laboratory equipment.

Dancer in the Coq d'or Ballet - 1938

Miss Winifred Mercier, Principal of Whitelands College - 1938
This seems to be a posthumous portrait, as Mercier died in 1934. I include it because it shows Birley's skill at depicting human skin, not an easy matter.

George VI - 1939

Winston Churchill - 1946

Viscount Montgomery of Alamein - 1948

Princess Elizabeth - 1950

Dwight Eisenhower - 1951
When Ike was in command of NATO. One of Birley's last paintings.

In the Beginning: Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam (1859-1935), who dropped "Frederick" early in his career, was one of the best known and most successful American Impressionists. An extensive Wikipedia biography is here, which indicates that Hassam was largely self-taught, receiving instruction sporadically, and began his career as an illustrator.

Hassam was able to visit Paris while still in his twenties. Therefore, he was aware of the French Impressionists and perhaps Postimpressionist stirrings in the Parisian art world. Combining his virtual lack of academic art training, the need to make illustrations fairly quickly, and his exposure to Impressionism, Hassam was a fast, prolific producer of images then can fairly be termed sketchy. This was true for most of his career after around 1890, though when the occasion called for it, he could tighten up his technique. Examples include watercolors featuring architecture and oil portraits or studies of female nudes.

The present post features paintings Hassam made in the mid-to-late 1880s and very early 1890s. While they contain greater or lesser hints of Impressionism and sketchiness, they are distinctly different from his strongly Impressionist-style paintings of, say, 1910-20.

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Allies Day, May 1917 - 1917
When the subject of Childe Hassam comes up, this is the kind of painting that often comes to mind. It is Impressionist, but of the American variety where more attention is paid to value (light-dark), and the structure of subject matter is more carefully depicted than was the wont of Claude Monet in his later years.

Old House in Dorchester [Massachusetts] - 1884
Painted not long after Hassam first visited Europe. The siding boards of the building are clearly shown, but the foreground grasses are freely painted.

Boston Common at Twilight - 1885
Perhaps his best known non-Impressionist work. It can be seen at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Rainy Day, Boston - 1885

Rainy Day, Boston - 1885
Two wet Boston scenes. Below, you will find similar treatments of Paris.

A City Fairyland - 1886
Again, in Boston.

Paris Street Scene - 1887

Grand Prix Day - 1887-88

Cab Station, rue Bonaparte - 1887

Hackney Carriage, rue Bonaparte - 1888
I've walked the rue Bonaparte many times, but can't place the locations of these paintings on that street. Either my memory is poor, or a few changes might have happened over the past 125 years. (I just checked Google Maps and didn't notice the walls shown in the paintings, so I suppose that changes were indeed made.)

April Showers, Champs-Élysées - 1888
Hassan clearly enjoyed painting rain-soaked streets, but he tightened up when it came to the woman, omnibus and horses.

Lower Fifth Avenue [New York] - 1890
The subjects are crisply outlined, but their interior coloring was influenced by Impressionism.

Diego Rivera's Cubist Period

Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez (1886-1957) usually known as Diego Rivera, remains Mexico's best-known artist nearly 60 years after his death. Much of Rivera's art from around 1920 onwards featured political subjects. Since I happen to believe that politicized art distracts viewers from aesthetic content (paintings become elaborate political cartoons), I have never been a Rivera fan.

His earliest works tended to be non-political because he seems to have been sharpening and evolving his artistic skills until he reached his early 30s. He spent about a dozen years in Europe -- Paris, mostly -- starting in 1907, and knew many of the modernist artists who created the onslaught of stylistic "isms" in the early 1900s. This included Cubism, a practice he adopted for about three years, and the subject of this post.

Wikipedia's Rivera biography is here. A discussion of his Cubist phase can be found here. Rivera's Cubist paintings was the subject of a museum exhibit in Dallas a few years ago.

Here are some of Rivera's works from that period.

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The Flower Carrier - 1935
An example of Rivera's mature style. There are political implications here, but they are less overt than usual.

Girl with Artichokes - 1913

The Adoration of the Virgin - 1913
This image and the one above it have hints of Cubism, but are largely representational with other modernist elements thrown in. I like them better than his more purely Cubist works.

Oscar Miestchaninoff - 1913
Cubist faceting is more prominent here, but use of "multiple perspectives" is still absent.

Portrait of Zinoviev - 1913
Now we find face-on and profile views, here for a portrait of a Russian artist.  A muted Braque-Picasso color scheme also intrudes.

Two Women - Angelina Beloff and Maria Dolores Bastian - 1914
Many facets, but not much in the way of varying viewpoints.  Apparently Rivera could do Cubism superficially, but had a hard time going all the way.  Perhaps he realized that Cubism's central premise was silly in reality.

Young Man with Stylograph - 1914
Another derivative experiment by Rivera.  No worse than many Cubism-inspired painting of that time.

Ramon Gomez de la Serna - 1915
The subject is shattered Cubist-style, but the woman in the upper-left corner is garden-variety modernist.

Zapatista Landscape - 1915
The rifle is not cubified: Rivera's homage to revolutionary times back home in Mexico.

Maternity - Angelina Beloff and their son who died in 1918 - 1916
Plenty of facets and even some Fauvist coloring.  Rivera abandoned Cubism not long after this painting was made.

Molti Ritratti: Violet, Duchess of Rutland

Marion Margaret Violet (née Lindsay) Manners, Duchess of Rutland (1856-1937) was a famous Victorian beauty who was also an able amateur artist. A biographical sketch is here.

Given her social position and the fact that she was in her prime during a golden age of British portraiture, I find it surprising that Violet was little depicted. And those major portraits of her, as best I could locate via Google, were by only two artists, George Frederic Watts and James Jebusa Shannon.

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Photo of Violet Lindsay Manners

Self-Portrait

By George Frederic Watts - 1879

By George Frederic Watts - 1881

By James Jebusa Shannon - c. 1890

By James Jebusa Shannon - c. 1900
Other images on the Web have a blue cast to this image. I don't know which color scheme is correct, but am posting this one because it is larger.

By James Jebusa Shannon - 1918
Similar to the previous portrait, but Violet was now about 62 years old.