flapper

In her most erotically charged, fur clad pose, Marie Prevost is the epitome of the jazz age flapper in this rare early 1920s view. One of Edwin Bower Hesser’s classic portraits, this showgirl inspired Hollywood glamour portrait captures a soft-focus and decadent view of the scandal-ridden star, who is now as much remembered for her tragic death as her glorious career. This large-format, double weight, matte finish photograph is an unusual and important look at the cult icon in her prime.

Marie Prevost in Erotic Flapper View

Artist: Edwin Bower Hesser

This Pierrot-inspired flapper girl pastel was created by Henry Clive as cover art for a Hollywood Comedy Club burlesque program. With a mischevious glint in her eye, the smiling blond embodies the devil-may-care ethos of the early jazz age. After moving to California to work in silent films, Clive was very much a part of the Hollywood social scene. This original pastel is an early example of his fraternal pursuits, and includes a faint dedication to a fellow member of the Hollywood Comedy Club for which this was created.

Hollywood Comedy Club

Artist: Henry Clive

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 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

In an unusual blonde hatted view by George Hurrell, Joan Crawford is captured in her most captivating glory by the master of Hollywood photography George Hurrell. In a gentle sepia on a large format double weight semi-gloss paperstock, Hurrell captures the beauty of the young Joan Crawford, with her effortless art deco style, and emboldened flapper sensibility. This is blindstamped by Hurrell lower right, and inkstamped on verso.

Pre-Code Joan Crawford

Artist: George Hurrell

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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