Above: Detail

A dazzling and scarce surviving commercial pin up illustration by Pearl Frush Brudon, a successful female illustrator who worked in gouache and watercolors with a unique and spectacular photo realism to her works. A lovely red headed seductress of the 1940s appears in soft focus in this luminous work, signed lower right, with the artist’s married name.

Above: Verso view of illustration board

Above: Full view of gouache painting

Pearl Frush was born in Iowa, although she and her family moved to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi when she was still a child. She enrolled in art instruction courses New Orleans before moving on to study in Philadelphia and New York. By this time her family had moved to Chicago, where she joined them after enrolling at the Chicago Art Institute.

Frush opened her Chicago studio in the early 1940s, doing freelance work and working for the Sundblom, Johnson and White Studio. By 1943 she was working for the Gerlach-Barklow Calendar Company, producing a popular series of work such as: Liberty Belles, Girls of Glamour and Glamour Round the Clock. In 1955 the Brown and Bigelow Calendar Company started producing calendars of her work.

Pearl Frush’s work was painted primarily in watercolors and gouache, and her crisp detailed style is mindful of Vargas’s Esquire Magazine era work. Her subjects are often more gracefully portrayed and less overtly sexual than other artists work of the time.