Grapefruit Moon Gallery

Original Art from the Grand Age of American Illustration

1930s

A haunting and epic large scale finely detailed and tonally impacting oil on canvas painting by Charles E. Chambers. An Orientalist Black Market alter scene that utilizes ochre and umber tones in a dark and menacing suspense filled manner. This was an interior illustration for “Sons” the second book in the Good Earth trilogy by Pulitzer Prize winning author Pearl S. Buck. This eerie and emotionally powerful image illustrates a pivotal scene in which the Wang family, having lost their fortune through opium promiscuity, is forced to sell their village estate and its contents, in a black market auction of sorts.

Before the Altar

Artist: Charles Edward Chambers

The parties at Ocean House … were strictly Marion, and there with gaiety, generosity, and bubbling fun she entertained her multitude of friends. Each year she gave a costume ball on W.R.’s birthday. There was a 49’er party; a kid party, when Gable came as a boy scout and Joan Crawford as Shirley Temple; an […]

Marion Davies Hosts A Hollywood Costume Party

An inventive and smart C.1930 pastel by frequent Golden Age of Hollywood Movie Magazine cover artist Mila Baine, showing a radiant and stylish Claudette Colbert. Likely a cover for the title Movie Mirror, where Blaine did numerous commissioned covers of Hollywood’s leading ladies in the early 1930s. From the collection of Ken Galente, former owner of Silver Screen Gallery in New York City.

Claudette Colbert

Artist: Mila Baine

A smartly conceived and modern jazz age oil-on-canvas painting of a ravishing Jeanette MacDonald, the cover for The New Movie Magazine, June 1932. Executed in a high glamour, severe art deco style by the American Illustrator McClelland Barclay. Work is a defining example by this talented and prolific artist and comes beautifully framed in an ornate gold gilt American Arts & Crafts fine museum quality carved frame. A lost treasure from the golden age of Hollywood glamour and elegance.

Jeanette MacDonald

Artist: McClelland Barclay

A dashing original pastel illustration, a scarce surviving Golden Age of Hollywood cover portrait of the lovely Marion Davies. Davies, a true film legend, is captured in an opulent and unabashedly art deco pose by frequent tinsel-town illustrator Charles Gates Sheldon. This large and inventive work was used as the March 1936 cover of “Movie Classic Magazine”. Pastel is in a fine original state of conservation and framed and matted behind glass in an an ornate gesso period antique frame.

A Dashing Marion Davies

Artist: Charles Sheldon

Joseph Pignone created this haunting and just mesmerizing gouache illustration painting for the July 1934 cover of Radio-Craft magazine. In this visually commanding original cover illustration from the machine age era of science and industry and modernist design aesthetics, a blind flapper girl with short bobbed hair holds a radio device that was created to guide the blind. Includes a printers proof tear sheet of the published magazine.

Radio Device Guides The Blind

Artist: Joseph Pignone

Grapefruit Moon Gallery just unearthed a small collection of original Campbell’s Soup Kids illustrations. These appeared as print ads in countless American mainstream publications such as The Saturday Evening Post in the 1930s. In this offering a Dolly Dingle-type Campbell’s Soup Kid puts her doll to bed. Accompanying text reads; “Not a drop of Campbell’s left upon her spoon, So the good old sand man’s Coming mighty soon!” Nicely matted and framed behind glass with typewritten caption window.

Sand Man’s Coming Soon

Artist: School of Grace Drayton

One of the more surreal takes on the 1929 stock market crash which led to the Great Depression is on view in this October 1930 Campbell’s Soup advertisement which appeared in The Saturday Evening Post. A Campbell’s Soup Kid reads the latest stock news from a state of the art glass domed stock ticker machine. Wishful text reads “The news that I’m reading look’s dandy to me. Like a plateful of Campbell’s Which fills me with glee.” This original illustration painting is a supremely odd example of Americana advertising.

Dandy To Me

Artist: School of Grace Drayton

A stylish and decidedly art deco cover illustration for the September 9th, 1939 issue of Liberty magazine, painted by the prolific illustrator Victor Tchetchet. Depicting a Carole Lombard-esque blonde bombshell in a Diana the Huntress mythological pose. Dedicated and inscribed to the fabled Hollywood film producer Otto Preminger, as seen lower right. Painting has been handsomely […]

Diana The Huntress

Artist: Victor Tchetchet

 

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