July 28, 2014 is the one hundredth anniversary * of the beginning of what the British called, The Great War. While America had already experienced the vast destruction (of humans and land) during our mid-19th century Civil War, World War I was the first time Europe experienced the broad devastation of land and people in

While you might not be aware of the illustrator Tony Sarg (1882-1942) by name, some of his work still influences our lives. Sarg was born in Guatemala to a German father and an English mother. Despite his training for a career in the military, Sarg rebelled and instead focused on illustration art moving to London

In the early part of the 20th century, American artists looked to contemporary music as a viable exemplar of time and motion to apply to their visual expression giving the more static traditional forms of painting and sculpture a new energy and a sense of movement. Ragtime, the Blues, and Jazz provided new snappier or

In 1916 the illustrator Everett Shinn was commissioned to create the first of June cover illustration for Vanity Fair magazine (see below). To express the frothy entertainments of summer, Shinn portrayed an upscale dandy with his boater in his proper right hand and his elegantly dressed companion seated among or straddling the bough’s of a tree,

In John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration, my new book from Yale University Press, I use the work of Sloan—an early twentieth-century American artist and member of The Eight and the Ashcan School–as a lens through which to consider the subject of illustration more broadly. As such, while the book focuses primarily on the several decades around

As we have seen in a previous Exploring Illustration entry, during the late 1930s and 1940s, Al Parker created a series of cover illustrations for the Ladies Home Journal that featured mother and daughter characters dressed in same type and style of clothing.* Al Parker (1906-1985); “Even a little can help a

Lynn Buckham (1918-1982) [Embracing Couple] Story illustration for “The Heady Career of Samuel Watkins” by Edward Lanham in Good Housekeeping (October 1967) If you believe the images created for magazines and advertising illustrations in the third quarter of the 20th century you would think that all women from that time were beautiful;

Proctor and Gamble Company of Cincinnati first sold Ivory Soap in 1879. As you can see in the ad here on the right, early advertising illustration was produced in a minimalist way and from a purely practical aspect—so what you see is a pair of hands use a thread to divide the double-sized bar soap at

The Gerlach Barklow Company produced art calendars and advertising materials in Joliet, Illinois from 1907 through the late 1950s.* Their popular calendars were typically personalized for the businesses who purchased them to distribute to their customers as gifts. Many of the company’s illustration artists were women, some even residents of the local area. One of

During the 18th and well into the 19th century silhouette portraiture was a popular means for Americans to preserve likenesses of themselves. Often created by itinerate artists and with the aid of various devices, silhouettes were produced as unique works or at most in limited numbers of copies.*  By mid-19th century photographic techniques rapidly displaced