1920s

An important early cover painting by Jerome Rozen for the June 7, 1927 long running twice monthly adventure pulp title “Popular Stories.” This painting combines Westward Ho, covered wagon western Americana imagery with civil war drama, in a vaguely historical scene with intensely powerful imagery. The depiction, in the strong color blocks for which the pulps were famed, features a confederate soldier menacing an elderly African America slave and sympathetic young damsel who are attempting to flee unspoken horrors through the desolate prairie.

A Covered Wagon Confrontation

Artist: Jerome Rozen

This large and luminous oil on canvas by Charles E. Chambers was created most likely as an interior story illustration for The Saturday Evening Post. Though the piece is unsigned, it contains all of the characteristics of Chambers work, and is undoubtedly an example of his glossy magazine socialites. Dating to about 1930, the scene features a number of refined jazz age beauties in modest yet flapper inspired apparel enjoying a garden teatime with a dapper suitor.

Tea in the Afternoon

Artist: Charles Edward Chambers

A large and expressive avant-garde gouache illustration painting by noted German/American artist and illustrator Carl Link, the dancer pictured is identified on the verso as Dorsha Hayes. In the late 1920’s along with Alberto Varga, Carl Link created numerous covers for the Bernarr MacFadden publication “The Dance” capturing the art deco modernist dance movement in a lyrical and flowing inventive manner. Painting is beautifully framed and matted behind glass and is a defining example from the Charles Martignette collection.

The Dance

Artist: Carl Link

A stylized and well conceived gouache illustration painting dated 1925 by New York City artist and illustrator Robert Reid MacGuire. This art deco erotic offering features a nearly nude goddess in a gossamer long dress with a train attended to by 2 blackamoor servants. We are unsure of the exact usage of this illustration it likely was published as a full color bookplate in an unidentified pulication. The artist was active in New York City as both a designer and an artist and had his first exhibition in 1928 in Manhattan.

A Gossamer Goddess

Artist: Robert Reid MacGuire

From the estate of legendary jazz-age Ziegfeld Follies photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston comes this sensational pastel by noted American illustrator Penrhyn Stanlaws. Inscribed “To Cheney from Penrhyn Stanlaws”, this is a fabulous offering it features a stylish 1920s flapper girl in a cloche hat admiring her abundant beauty in a compact mirror. This was created as the cover for the October 4, 1924 issue of Collier’s magazine, and later inscribed and gifted to Johnston.

A Stylish Fadeaway Girl

Artist: Penrhyn Stanlaws

A rare surviving art deco gouache painting by one of our favorite American illustrators Edward Eggleston. This was created as the cover for a Valentines Day themed crafting magazine, Dennison’s Party Magazine,Jan/Feb 1928. Eggleston was a New York based calendar artist and illustrator who is best remembered today for his Jazz Age, racy and stylized 1920s Atlantic City travel posters that brought to light the allure of the flapper girl with risque bathing beauty imagery.

The Valentine Girl

Artist: Edward Eggleston

An early offering by legendary American pin-up artist and cover illustrator Peter Driben likely created in the late 1920s when the artist was a resident of Paris France and contributed popular illustrations in various French showgirl magazines chronicling the exciting Parisian nightlife and its lovely erotic burlesque Follies Dancers. Nicely matted and framed behind glass; from the famed collection of Charles Martignette.

Capturing The Moment

Artist: Peter Driben

A 1920s original oil on canvas painting by noted New York artist and muralist John Hemming Fry. Like his fellow muralists Eugene Savage and Edwin H. Blashfield, Fry created epic imagery in a dreamscape romanticized style, borrowing freely from classical Greek, Celtic and Roman folklore and imagery. This mythological trilogy on death and dying features three separate vignettes painted in subdued blue and steel gray tones against a background of ancient Northern European hills. A flowing, lyrical, sometimes abstracted composition that also incorporates elements of the contemporaneous Dada and Surrealist movements. An inventive and decorative large antique oil painting that retains its original handsome gesso frame, and is verso inkstamped by the artist.

A Celtic Tragedy

Artist: John Hemming Fry

A luminous and rare Golden Age of Illustration cover oil painting for the Saturday Evening Post, entitled “Graduate On Top Of the World”, by Edmund Davenport. This appeared as the cover the June 13, 1925 issue and is a fresh to the market work that finds the artist (who contributed three Post covers in 1925) painting in a Norman Rockwell like illustrative style. The unusual subject, that of a confident, young pretty, independent flapper on graduation day, and the scarcity of surviving Post covers from this era add to the already enormous appeal of this lovely and historic American illustration painting.

Graduate On Top Of The World

Artist: Edmund Davenport

Hidden within the lush romanticism of Nell Brinkley’s beautiful pen & ink comic illustration “Cupid Catching Butterflies” is a forward thinking depiction of the new flapper woman of the 1920s. In pearls and marcel wave, the bow-lipped brunette sits besides a winged cupid who is drawing heart shaped butterflies nearer and nearer to her net. The Brinkley girl, as these iconic idealized beauties came to be known, will have no trouble catching a beau in this scene.

Cupid Catching Butterflies

Artist: Nell Brinkley

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