Original Art from the Grand Age of American Illustration
In this inspired and tremendously fun pen and ink illustration, two Brinkley girls are seen in an all out battle to catch a bridal bouquet tossed by an unseen hand. In an ironic turn, they become so engrossed in their conflict that the flowers they are fighting for appear about to fall to the ground. The frenzied scene, with its youthful energy and sexuality suggests the ambivalence of Brinkley’s new woman towards traditional marriage.
Artist: Nell Brinkley
Offered here is an original piece of camera ready artwork–pen and ink with collage elements–created for billboard advertising usage during World War II.
Artist: Cardwell Higgins
An eerie and post apocalyptic Los Angeles cityscape appears in this original pulp painting by Lloyd Birmingham used as the cover for “Analog – Science Fact, Science Fiction”, Feb. 15, 1962. Dating both the birth of the era of space exploration (John Glenn would become the first American to orbit the earth one week after the appearance of this issue) and anxieties about the foreign menace of the Cold War Soviet Union, this painting imagines a Los Angeles which has been occupied by aliens and left to rot until it is merely a spaceport for a backwater planet.”
Artist: Lloyd Birmingham
The iconic original sci-fi pulp painting by Lloyd Birmingham was created for and used as the cover of “Amazing – Fact and Science Fiction” April 1962. Illustrating the Mark Clifton interior story “Hang Head, Vandal!” this shows a haunting image of a scarecrow made from what remains of a spaceman perched up over the plains of a flatly rendered landscape, made up of but a few perspective lines trailing away into the distance creating a surreal and cerebral science fiction fantasy image.
Artist: Lloyd Birmingham
The original gouache cover painting by Lloyd Birmingham used for the December 1964 “Stories of Imagination – Fantastic” pulp magazine published by Ziff-Davis, illustrating the Philip K. Dick short novel “The Unteleported Man”. A fresh to the market cover published pulp painting that had remained for decades in the artists upstate New York estate. Work is handsomely framed in a retro looking limed oak fine gallery frame behind glass, comes with the complete published December 1964 edition of Fantastic Stories of Imagination.
Artist: Lloyd Birmingham
One of two 1930s oil on stretched canvas paintings we have acquired by Robert T. Riley, a New York state fine artist and illustrator who worked in a social realist / WPA bleak stylized Regionalist aesthetic. In this expressive work, Riley evokes the anxieties caused by a football injury as a player is carted off the field, capturing the multitude of pained expressions on the faces of those gathered. This somber, painting was created during the depths of the Great Depression and it offers bleak commentary on the hardships endured by all men.
Artist: Robert Riley
A sophisticated charcoal portrait by iconic and beloved American artist and illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, dated 1936. A severe yet fetching caricature-styled portait of Hollywood film legend Gloria Swanson during her self-imposed seven year hiatus from Hollywood. Flagg created a series of similar portraits for the cover of Photoplay Magazine during the years 1936 – 1938. This was likely commissioned by Photoplay for the series, but scrapped when a rumored return to film by Swanson failed to materialize.
Artist: James Montgomery Flagg
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.
Artist: Robert Reid MacGuire
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.
Artist: Nell Brinkley
Six Brinkley girls, each with distinct style and personality, are shown in a classroom, preparing to take their knowledge of the geography of beauty out into the wider world. A map, at the time, was slang for a beautiful face, and there is no question that these maps would lead to men’s hearts across the country. Created as a stand alone cartoon for an unidentified Hearst publication, this pen & ink on board illustration contains all the elements that made Nell Brinkley the pre-eminent female cartoonist of the early 20th century.
Artist: Nell Brinkley
