In 1919 Ellen Bernard Thompson Pyle’s husband of fifteen years passed away. Left with four children under the age of thirteen and a mortgage, Ellen Pyle decided to return to illustrating in order to support her family. In the 1890s she had been an art student at the Drexel Institute

Like other popular mass-circulation weekly magazines, Liberty, established in 1924, tried out a variety of cover designs until it hit on the creation of a visual running story-line to keep audiences returning week after week to see the next segment of the story. They called this the “continuity cover.”

In Norman Rockwell’s illustrations it is quite common to find references to other art used as a signifier of culture or as a reference to the setting or content of the picture. The unpublished illustration Marriage Counselor, is one such illustration, which is rather startling since the subject of the

Howard Pyle (1853-1911)|My hatred of him seemed suddenly to have taken to itself wings’|Illustration for Harold Frederic’s “In the Valley” in Scribner’s Magazine v.8 (July 1890): 93 and in Harold Frederic, In the Valley (New York: Scribner’s, 1890) and in F. Hopkinson Smith, American Illustrations (New York: Scribner’s, 1892)|Oil on canvas|Norman

This grisaille illustration and four others were created by Rockwell to accompany a Ralph Henry Barbour story published in St. Nicholas magazine in December of 1914. Barbour (1870-1944) was a popular author in the early twentieth century who wrote more than a hundred stories primarily focused on sport’s ability to