Cover Gallery: America’s Wildlife

Harry C. Edwards painted four covers for the Saturday Evening Post. This 1901 cover featuring a lone wolf and single bison is his only Post cover to have wildlife as its main subject.

 

This 1902 cover was Charles Bull’s first Post cover. Bull was one of the most prolific wildlife cover artists for the Post and a famous nature illustrator of the time.

 

This Charles Bull Post cover features sled dogs in the icy wilderness. It accompanies the cover story about beginning Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild,” a novel where the main character is a sled dog in Alaska.

 

Sarah Stilwell-Weber painted this Saturday Evening Post cover. She painted the majority of her covers between 1904 and 1921. This cover of a little girl playing with squirrels stuck to Stilwell-Weber’s specialty of painting small children.

 

Though Charles Bull was primarily known as a nature illustrator, he spent part of his time as a taxidermist for the National Museum in Washington, D.C. Some of his illustrations were drawn from this experience.

 

The orange-red background on this Post cover is the same color Charles Bull used in his previous cover on April 21, 1917. Bull was commissioned to paint the 1917 cover as a declaration of war, and for the next year and a half, war dominated the Post’s covers.

 

J.C. Leyendecker’s work for the Post began in the early 1900s. His work always presented a variety of styles, from contemporary to colonial to medieval. This cover is similar to his August 26, 1933 cover with its human and animal subjects in a bright green field.

 

Jack Murray showed an interest in wildlife at a young age, and that showed in the work he did for the Saturday Evening Post. This 1941 is similar to his other covers, all of which featured wildlife and bright-colored backgrounds.

 

This is one of five covers that W.W. Calvert painted for the Post. This is his only cover with a bald eagle as the main subject, while the others feature dogs.