Above: Full view of gouache painting

Above: The artists signature

A deftly rendered cover painting for The American Magazine by Herbert Paus, who developed an inventive and entirely modernist, machine age, industrial aesthetic. A striking seaside beauty is depicted playing a concertina in this rare surviving original cover painting from the golden age of American illustration. Herbert Paus was a leading illustrator who contributed covers for Life, Collier’s, Leslie’s and the Woman’s Home Companion magazines.

Above: Printed Edition of American Magazine (included in sale)

Above: Detail

Above: Framed in fine silver gallery frame

Herbert Paus was a native of Minneapolis and got his first job as a cartoonist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Ambitious to become an illustrator, he enrolled in the Fine Arts School there, later found employment in a Chicago art studio.

Eventually he moved to New York where he became a free lance illustrator. Paus had a strong sense of design, ideally suited to the many effective posters he painted during World War I. This approach, combined with a striking use of color, was carried over into his magazine illustrations and cover designs. He created covers for Leslies, Life, Liberty, The American and Woman’s Home Companion.

Paus painted for such advertisers as Victor Records, Hart Schaffner and Marx, Goodyear Tires and Willys Knight Motorcars. For several years Paus was under exclusive contract to do all the covers for Popular Science Monthly.