Flapper and Roadster
Coles Phillips
September 23, 1922

Coles Phillips (1880-1927) was almost reckless. As a young salesman, he once got caught drawing a caricature of an important client (by the client). Another time he rented a studio with no way to pay for it. But what he lacked in prudence, Phillips made up for with confidence.

He left college in 1904 in his junior year with no plan, and, at that point, no inkling that his future would involve art. He had drawn and sketched since he was a boy but had not considered it a serious endeavor. Instead he began his career as a clerk for a company that sold radiators. That job ended shortly after a major client, who kept Phillips waiting, came up behind Phillips just in time to see the young clerk sketching a caricature of the businessman himself on an old envelope.

No, Phillips didn’t get fired. According to the 1928 Post article, “The Making of an Illustrator,” written by his widow, Teresa Hyde Phillips, the businessman loved the drawing. “He laughed a good deal and wanted to know why a chap with talent like that was holding down a job with a radiator concern.” Before long Phillips was in art school, albeit briefly. He took night classes for about three months. But it was enough time for him to know he wanted to draw. He just needed to figure out how to make it pay.

Vitralite Enamel advertisement
Coles Phillips
May 3, 1924

So the young artist visited a small ad agency with some sketches under his arm. “My name is Coles Phillips,” he said, “and I’ve dropped in with a rather important bit of news. I’m going to work for you.” Although this announcement resulted in “no marked enthusiasm on the part of his host,” his wife wrote, the sketches did impress the agency. This and the artist’s ebullient personality (and the fact “that he had a remarkable ability to sell anything, including his own ideas and work”) led to his securing a position. He was only with the ad agency a short period of time before he decided to open an agency of his own.

But Phillips grew tired of the business end of running an agency and wanted more time to draw. Studying periodicals of the period, he decided he was going to work for Life magazine. Apparently, it never occurred to him that his work could be declined. He rented a studio telling the landlord he had some important orders that would bring in plenty of money to pay him before the month was up.

He then hired a model and worked for weeks on a drawing, while the increasingly nervous landlord made frequent visits. When the drawing was finally ready, he carried it over to the Life building, asking to see the editor.

Phillips at work in his New Rochelle studio in 1921.
“The Making of an Illustrator,” The Saturday Evening Post; April 7, 1928.

A secretary informed him that Editor John Ames Mitchell was not available and that he only saw artists on Wednesdays. As luck would have it, the business manager, on his way to lunch, stopped and looked at the drawing. “I think Mr. Mitchell would like to see this,” he said.

Soon a secretary appeared with those magic words: “Mr. Mitchell would like to see Mr. Phillips.” There is an old saying that God watches over drunks and fools. Perhaps it should include brash young men. Phillips left with a check for $150.00. (Today the equivalent of that 1907 windfall would be more than $3,600.) He celebrated at a local hangout with his friends, as his wife recalled in the 1928 Post memoir, adding, “I don’t know where the landlord celebrated.”

Community Silver advertisement
Coles Phillips
December 2, 1911

Around 1908, Mitchell went to Phillips and asked if he could come up with a different kind of image. Phillips had already been working on a technique for an advertising client, and it not only worked for Life, it became the artist’s signature work.“It was what became afterward his well-known fade-away type of drawing, where the figure fades into the background and is caught here and there by some accessory or highlight,” wrote Mrs. Phillips.

The “fade-away” effect was used in this 1911 ad for Community Silver, left, and takes on an art deco vibe in the 1923 Post cover, Broken Pearls, shown below, center. This distinctive technique is shown with dazzling effect in a video put together by KistoDreams.

The likely inspiration for the 1920 cover—below, right—was the F. Scott Fitzgerald story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” which had run in the Post earlier that year. The days of the beautiful but proper Gibson Girl with her lush tresses and cool demeanor was in the past, and the Roaring ’20s were here.

In the ’20s, Phillips was making an excellent living working for advertisers and a number of periodicals, including Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and, like fellow New Rochelle resident Norman Rockwell, The Saturday Evening Post.

Portrait of Coles Phillips
Norman Rockwell
April 7, 1928

“He used to get marvelous prices for his work as much as, if not more than, any illustrator,” wrote Norman Rockwell speaking of Phillips in My Life as an Illustrator. “First, he’d think of the best price he could hope for; then he’d think of his four children and add four hundred dollars. In the twenties, he received two thousand dollars a picture, which was fabulous.”

Phillips was just as forthright about expressing his opinion of the popular artist’s work, which wasn’t always kind. According to Rockwell, Phillips would criticize his work as too commercial, too bland, saying, “Old men and boys! Haven’t you got any guts? You’re young. Haven’t you got any sex? Old men and boys. For Lord’s sake!”

Although Rockwell thought of Phillips as “a smart fellow” who probably would have succeeded at whatever field he might have chosen, he wrote, “I didn’t lose any sleep over his criticisms. He didn’t like Howard Pyle. Or Rembrandt. Or Degas. Or Leonardo da Vinci. … In fact, he didn’t like anybody and couldn’t understand why an artist would want to paint anything but pretty girls.”

Click here to view the fade-away girl, along with other Coles Phillips art, in this beautiful video by KistoDreams.

Flat Tire
Coles Phillips
July 15, 1922 flat tire

Broken Pearls
Coles Phillips
November 17, 1923

Bernice Bobs Her Hair
Coles Phillips
November 6, 1920

Classic Post Artist: Coles Phillips Exemplified Roaring ’20s Style The Saturday Evening Post

Woman with Basketball

Woman with Basketball
Carol Aus
November 20, 1909

Very little is known today about Norwegian-born illustrator Carol Aus (1878-1934) except that she was known for portrait painting. That talent shines through in this 1909 basketball player.

The Post published seven of Aus’ portraits, all of which appeared on the cover.

Schoolgirl Primping

Schoolgirl Primping
Paul Stahr
September 10, 1921

This pretty cover girl, whose only concern is looking good in a new hat, was created the same year Albert Einstein was lecturing about his new theory of relativity in Stahr’s home state, New York. As a longtime resident of Long Island, Stahr (1883-1953) was close to the East Coast’s publishing companies, and he took full advantage of it. He illustrated for Life and Colliers and was versatile enough to become known as a pulp magazine artist.

The pulps were inexpensive fiction magazines popular from the 1890s through the 1950s (they were printed on cheap paper from wood pulp, hence the name). From 1924 to 1934, Stahr created a number of covers for Argosy magazine, a pulp that boasted authors such as Upton Sinclair and Zane Grey.

Movie Star

Movie Star
Norman Rockwell
February 19, 1938

The Saturday Evening Post had reached its 3-million-circulation milestone just before this cover was published. Rockwell liked to have fun with the familiar logo, and in this case, he obscured part of it with dormitory regulations. The rules state that male companions are not allowed in the dorm at any time, but with a stash of movie-star photos, these teenagers have found a loophole. The idol in hand is actor Robert Taylor, who made millions of female hearts beat faster in his starring role opposite Greta Garbo in Camille. Movie magazines were just then becoming a national pastime—at least among teenage girls, who were trading and swooning over glossy photos of the current heartthrobs.

Rockwell created several covers that included pictures within a picture. Another example of this is The Great Debate, where the newspapers in the illustration clearly show 1948 presidential candidates Truman and Dewey.

March Band at Football Game

March Band at Football Game
Stevan Dohanos
October 19, 1946

Playing an energetic march while keeping a close eye on the game requires dexterity only a teenager can manage, but Stevan Dohanos made sure the rest of us could watch the game in the tuba’s reflection.

Dohanos began this 1946 painting by filling his Westport, Connecticut, home with equipment borrowed from a local high school band. “The tough job,” he said, “was keeping my guests away from the instruments.” Post editors reported “almost everyone who dropped in while Dohanos was at work turned out to be a former musician, the kind who hasn’t laid lip to a trombone for 10 years, but is sure he hasn’t lost the old knack or wants to see if he can still play the second-coronet part from ‘Under the Double Eagle.’”

Fortunately for Post readers, Dohanos did get the job done, and he learned a lesson about his visitors in the process: “I never knew my friends had so much musical talent, or lacked so much.”

Father’s Homework

Father's Homework
John Falter
May 7, 1960

Of this 1960 cover Post editors asked the question, “If one furrow-browed father spends x hours failing to solve the quadratic equations of one boy, how long would it take two furrow-browed fathers to fail to solve the quadratic equation of two boys?”

Though artist John Falter (1910-1982), a self-proclaimed “dunce in algebra,” may have struggled to find a solution for x, he never struggled to find work as an artist.

He was described by the Post as a workhorse sketching six days a week from 3:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. When he entered the Navy during World War II, he found a way to continue his career: he designed more than 300 posters and other recruitment materials for the military. The same year he enlisted, he created his first of 125 covers for the Post.That prodigious output continued throughout his life; it is estimated that he completed more than 5,000 paintings.

Classic Covers: The American Teenager The Saturday Evening Post

Spring is here, and our northern areas are encountering the almost-forgotten sights and sounds of this gently blustering season. There are whitecapped millponds, stretching and tossing after their icy hibernations; pussy willows sunning themselves like wise kittens; and increasingly frequent flashes of bright birds back home after their vacation down South.

There’s the first faintly perceptible yellowing of bare-limbed maples beginning to get dressed in their cool summer green; snow banks of spiraea blossoms making believe that winter has come back; lines of Monday-morning wash whipping like bright flags under the high-riding sun.

There’s the sound of peepers in springtime pools, reminding us that even April can get a little frog in her throat in such changeable weather; the drip of maple sap from a boy-broken tree branch and the back-to-work buzzing of bees; the chirping of newly hatched chicks; the eager rush and gurgle of city gutters and country trout streams; the satisfying crack of the first clean-hit ball and the mud sucking sound of boys’ shoes, unfettered by galoshes, as they play catch in a soggy field.

There’s a new ring to Sunday church bells, unhurried but clear over the balmy air, telling us that perhaps it is not yet irrevocably later than we think, that there is always a new beginning, another chance for our sad old world, one more hope for us all.

If you would like to order a fine art print of any classic Post cover, please visit http://curtispublishing.com/pdf/order_prints.pdf or call Janie Mahoney at 317-633-2070 for more information.

"Apple Blossoms" by Howard Scott; 1944

"Spring Storm Moving In," by John Falter; 1952

"Flying Kites," by John Falter; 1950

"Windy City," by John Falter; 1946

"Hardware Store at Springtime," by Stevan Dohanos; 1946

"Chicks in Incubator," by Stevan Dohanos; 1949

"Recess at Pine Creek," by John Clymer; 1960

"Harbinger of Spring," by John Clymer; 1955

"Oregon Baseball," by John Clymer; 1951

Artists Brush with Spring The Saturday Evening Post