A beautiful oil on canvas portrait painting by the noted female American Golden Age illustrator Edna Crompton. This was exhibited in the 1920s at Beard Art Galleries in Minneapolis as part of their one woman show “Girls of America”. Crompton was a prolific cover illustrator for American mainstream publications including The Saturday Evening Post and Redbook magazine, she also worked creating calendar art for the Osborne Calendar Company conceiving modernist flapper girl series of images with skillfully composed portraits that were marketed with snappy titles such as “Girls You Can’t Forget” and “Girls of Today”.

This painting was titled “Yellow Flowered Gown” and is listed as the 14th work in the Beard gallery catalog, the back stretcher bar is marked “14” and a vintage exhibit catalog of Beard Galleries show is included in the sale. We also have a few letters to Crompton from various calendar companies and several 5″ by 7″ photographs of her paintings that accompany the painting. It is likely that this painting was also published as either a Redbook cover or as a calendar image, as this exhibit focused primarily on her published illustrations, but we have not as of yet found the exact usage.

Edna Crompton of New York was a pupil of Frank Benson, Edwin Tarbell and Philip Hale, she studied at the Museum School of Drawing and Painting in Boston, The Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Fine Arts, Chicago.