Amos Sewell

Meet the Illustrator: Amos Sewell

“This car needs washing,” someone had written in the dirt on the side of the car. Could that someone be the wife standing at the door, arms crossed, while hubby strolls to the car carrying his golf bag? A businessman is having his coffee and dry toast at the lunch counter, but he can’t help but notice the young lady sitting beside him. She is unashamedly tucking into a huge banana split. These paintings of life in the 1950s were the works of Amos Sewell (1901-1983).

Another favorite Sewell cover shows a boy on his bike, which we understand doubles as a trusty steed, lassoing a fence post wearing a cowboy hat (the fence post is wearing the hat, not the boy). We bet he got that dastardly varmint. Wasn’t every boy in the 1950s a cowboy?

Born in San Francisco, Amos Sewell was a ranking California tennis player in his 20s when he suffered several ignominious defeats at the hands of Donald Budge, who would go on to win titles at Wimbleton and the U.S. Open in the 1930s. Convinced he was, ahem, in the wrong racket, he quit the sport to take a position in a bank for several years. Evenings were spent studying art, and vacations consisted of trips up and down the Pacific Coast, sketching and etching. In 1931, in the middle of the Depression, he decided he was tired of banking and hopped on a lumber boat bound for New York, via the Panama Canal. Like many illustrators of the time, he got his first freelance illustration assignments from the pulp fiction world, doing inside magazine illustrations for Street & Smith Publications in New York. In 1936 he did his first major work for The Country Gentleman and began working for the Post on a regular basis the following year.

Amos Sewell "Playing Cowboy" 1951

Amos Sewell "Banana Split" 1952

Amos Sewell "This Car Needs Washing" 1953

Artists

America’s Artist

Norman Rockwell didn’t create his celebrated images using only brush and paint. They often took shape first as scenes that Rockwell literally acted out. Showing their appreciation for his storytelling talents, film directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg share their private Rockwell collections with the Smithsonian for the upcoming exhibit Telling Stories.