Above: Published vintage mutoscope card included with sale

This sassy secretary pin up pastel was created by Earl Moran for the Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company in about 1940. The work appeared as a mutoscope card with the title “A Sweet Job.” Office girl pin up depictions were common during the pre-WWII lean economic years of the Great Depression, and this is an inspired example of that genre. Pastel is beautifully matted and framed and in a fine state of preservation, a published mutoscope card of the image is included in the sale. This  secretarial image also lent itself for advertising calendar placement, a dated 1942 mailing calendar with advertising for Supreme Power Supplies Limited is included in the sale, with anti-axis WWII text asking that no dictators apply  for the job.

Above: Verso view of illustration board

Above: Brown & Bigelow notations on verso

Earl Steffa Moran was born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, in December 1893. Like many of his contemporaries Moran studied at the Chicago Art Institute, where he studied for two years before moving on to Manhattan and enrolling at the Art Students League.

In 1932 he signed an exclusive contract with Brown and Bigelow and produced an astounding assortment of pin-up creations to satiate an American public that was consumed with Calendar Girls and all things pin-up.