A beautiful original painting by the noted female artist and illustrator Edna Crompton presumably used as cover art for The Redbook Magazine.
Artist: Edna Crompton
Illustration & Advertising Art
At the turn of the 20th century, Industrial Revolution inventions brought technological advancements to printmaking that ushered in a Golden Age of American illustration. Publishers and calendar companies developed new techniques for producing multi-color offset lithographs that were fast, affordable, and flat-out glorious to view, blurring the distinction between fine art and "art for commerce." The best examples by the finest commercial illustrators were revered by the public, and today are beloved by collectors.
This circa 1925 oil on canvas by F.R. Harper was used as calendar art by The American Art Works Calendar Company. For sale at Grapefruit Moon Gallery.
Artist: F. R. Harper
A haunting and menacing editorial political illustration by William Cotton, likely published in a late 1930s edition of Vanity Fair magazine. Pictured are the trio of Axis partners: Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito, with Hitler depicted as the larger and dominant evil force, strong-arming the other two dictators and controlling them as puppets. In […]
Artist: William Cotton
This interior genre scene features an exotic Edwardian Spanish Senorita in traditional garb posing seductively as she coyly holds a fan. An original oil on canvas by the well listed artist Alonzo Kimball, who studied in Paris during the 1890s at Académie Julian and later at The Art Students League of New York. The artist is best remembered for the covers he painted for The Saturday Evening Post.
Artist: Alonzo Kimball
This breezy sailor girl, bathing beauty pin-up graced the cover of the July 24, 1937 edition of Liberty magazine, a popular long running Bernarr MacFadden publication. By the artist R.C. Kauffmann–a personal favorite of the gallery–this is a tremendously spirited, large format oil painting with spectacular zest and allure. Kauffmann is best remembered for his Saturday Evening Post covers as […]
Artist: R.C. Kauffmann
Sam Cherry created this romance-themed Western pulp painting for use as the June, 1943 cover of Thrilling Ranch Stories – Romantic Stories of The West. The image shows a pretty blonde sweetheart of the rodeo embracing a Wild West town sheriff, who grins as he contemplates his great luck. Not only did he seemingly get the girl, a bullet aimed at […]
Artist: Sam Cherry
A delicately rendered mixed media work by Edwin Georgi which illustrated an interior story in The Saturday Evening Post. A tense dramatic courtroom portrayal from 1959 which captures the Perry Mason/Earle Stanley Gardner American Pop Culture sensation which was resonating at the time this commissioned work appeared in the Post. The lovely Georgi girl is “Policewoman O’Keefe,” and this work confirms our suspicion that illustrators frequently created their finest works for this highly circulated and revered Curtis Publications slick mainstream magazine institution.
Artist: Edwin Georgi
A large, detailed, preliminary calendar illustration by Andrew Loomis for a 1944 calendar commission of the Dionne Quintuplets that was titled May Time for The Brown & Bigelow Calendar Company. The Dionne Quintuplets were a Great Depression-era pop culture sensation and cautionary tale. Their images were reproduced everywhere and cover articles appeared in Time and […]
Artist: Andrew Loomis
A large and important bustling published colorful gouache illustration painting by Willy Pogany for an interior story titled “Nero’s Temple On The Nile”, which appeared in the January 12, 1947 edition of Randolph Hearst’s American Weekly Magazine. An over the top opulant Egyptian themed costumed imagining of life in ancient Rome, which appeared with the […]
Artist: Willy Pogany
A rare surviving c. 1910 large pastel illustration by the well listed and prolific illustrator Frederick Duncan. The sporty yet flirty glamour girl co-ed with a school book and a tennis racket personifies the socially progressive, daring and active woman who was coming into fashion as the voluptuous ideal of the Victorian woman of means waned. Works like this by Duncan, a cover artist for The Saturday Evening Post, popularized this independent, carefree vision of womanhood.
Artist: Frederick Duncan
