1971 Conoco Oil Annual Report

     Walter DuBois Richards's illustrations can be found in pamphlets, brochures, programs, and in this case an Annual Report for the petroleum giant Continental Oil Company in 1971.

     Wally produced five wonderful watercolors for the 1971 report.

  
    Wally did a considerable amount of commercial art for Conoco over several decades.  It is possible that the marketing director at Conoco was familiar with Walter's work and may have asked him to do this series for the Annual Report.    

     When this annual report came out, Conoco was expanding rapidly into a global force with over $2.3 billion in assets.

     Conoco seems to be stressing they are an environmentally-conscience company, which I can neither confirm nor deny.  One thing is clear, these are beautiful watercolors by Walter D. Richards.

1947 Univis Lens: See what you're missing!

     This illustration by Wally appeared in Time Magazine on May 12, 1947.  At the time he was working for the Charles E. Cooper studio in New York City.    

                 

The Univis Lens Company was a manufacturer of Bifocal and Trifocal Lenses.  

Trifocals are advertised here to 'clear up that arm's-length zone of blur.'

Budweiser in 1952: The Beer Of Your Lifetime

     

      This illustration Walter DuBois Richards produced for Budweiser in 1952 celebrates 100 years of brewing history of that famous Anheuser-Busch lager beer. 

     

     The illustration is well-composed, depicting a rural 19th-century baseball game behind what appears to be a finely dressed lady tending to a beer keg.  I wonder what Budweiser from an oak barrel would taste like.

     It's not Walter Richards's first illustration for Budweiser, but certainly one of his more interesting ones, tying together two of our countries great traditions: baseball and beer.

     Wally often used photographs of models to help define the positions or composure of a body as well as for the expressions on their faces.   

     One of my challenges is to try to find any photographs or 'provenance' for illustrations like these.  A very difficult challenge, but a potentially gratifying one.

Winchester Batteries' Bullet-Fast Light 1944

     In 1944 Wally created this interesting alternative viewpoint of the moment Christopher Columbus first set eyes on the New World in October of 1492**.  The illustration is part of an advertisement for Winchester's unit cell batteries which were about to hit the US market.



     As the Winchester Ad explains, Columbus "saw dim, flickering lights in the West."  This illustration depicts what that flickering light may have been.  

   


     According to the write-up, the natives of the Americas possibly used Tabanuco tree wood resin as thier burning material for torches.   Now I know. 

   
     Winchester Repeating Arms Company was a division of Western Cartridge Company located in New Haven, Connecticut in 1944.  



**If you look closely, you may notice Walter's signature is nowhere to be found on this illustration.  Many of the illustrations I've uncovered were set aside by either my father or by the artist himself (my Grandpa) as illustrations he produced as commercial art.  In fact, I found hundreds of such clippings in one box marked 'Personal Illustrations'; this is one of them.

Bad Medicine For Big Bombers: An Illustration For Westinghouse Electric

     It's easy to gravitate to Walter DuBois Richards's World War II illustrations.  While his career spanned nearly seven decades, there is a certain excitement and awe connected to this four year period that draws in my attention.




     This action filled illustration by WDR gives us a good idea of just how intense a naval battle could get.   The above scene seems to depict the British Navy's QF 2 Pounder naval gun, also known as the 'pom pom.'   


     The Westinghouse Electric elevator company division was given the responsibility of producing gun mounts that controlled the aiming of anti-aircraft artillery guns or batteries found on many US Navy warships.  
    This illustration advertisement appeared in Collier's on May 2, 1942.  Like most American corporations during WWII like GE and GM, Westinghouse Electric devoted most of it's resources to giving the allies an edge over it's enemies, and wanted the home front to know it.    

WDR at Tranquillini Inc., a Cleveland Studio in 1931

     My father confirmed with his mother Glenora (Wally's wife) that the following illustrations were made by Wally while he was working for Tranquillini Inc. in Cleveland.  


   
     As you can see in the illustration above, Tranquillini had branches in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis and New York.  It is at this studio that Walter met his lifelong friend and colleague, Stevan Dohanos.  


   
     When Walter Richards produced this drawing (or possibly a woodblock carving/linocut) for Energine, he was 24 years old and the Great Depression was in full swing.  He married Glenora Case a few months earlier on June 20, 1931.

An illustration WDR made for Greyhound while at Tranquillini Studios.

A 1955 Sports Illustrated Illustration

     This Sports Illustrated ad drawn by Walter Richards was published in late April, 1955.   According to an article on the Dodgers found on the backside of this page (and at the bottom of this post), about one week earlier the Brooklyn team had broken Major League Baseball's record for most wins (10) to start a season.  Opening day for the Dodgers in 1955 was April 13.



     When he drew this lithograph, Wally was probably still working for the Steven Lions Studio in New York City.  

     Glenora always told me that one of Wally's strengths as an illustrator was his ability to show a variety of emotions in his subjects.  

     I think this illustration is a good example of what she was talking about.   

     The article below revealed several important clues narrowing the date of Wally's illustration to late April of 1955.   

A 1943 Cadillac / Fighter Plane Illustration

     Soon after joining the Charles E. Cooper Studio** in the late 1930s, Walter Richards began producing lithographic illustrations for Cadillac, a division of General Motors.  Its possible that Wally's work for Cadillac in the 1930s led into the various illustrations he made for General Motors throughout World War II and beyond.  For example, Walter produced a series of tank illustrations for Cadillac, as well as an illustration for the Bliss-Leavitt Mark 13 torpedo built by Pontiac, also a division of General Motors. 

     This illustration, published in Collier's on September 11, 1943, is meant to raise awareness that during WWII General Motors mass-produced precision parts for various machines; such as the Allison transmission found in the above fighter plane. 
     The detail seen in the ground crew's clothes, their ripples, their shadows and reflections; it's all very impressive to me.  I remember that Wally enjoyed working in this war-time atmosphere.  With a wink he would tell me that he was an officer in the military during WWII, and brandish an official-looking military identification.  He explained to me he was given his rank so that he could have priority flying from one assignment to another.  

It's worth a read.  Notice the "Buy War Bonds And Stamps" stamp.  

   Starting in 1939, Cadillac began to focus it's manufacturing on producing precision parts for the liquid cooled Allison aircraft engine.  Turns out, WDR made illustrations profiling the Allison Transmission as well.  Impressively, Cadillac had to mass produce with extreme accuracy the machining of over 170 different aircraft parts.  Many of these machine parts required a tolerance grade of no more than three-ten thousandth of an inch.  Wow.  


I'm always interested in any further thoughts/knowledge you (the reader) may know about the illustrations I post, for example:

What type of plane is used for this illustration?
I see there are tents in the background, and the trees seem perhaps tropical in nature?  Is this an airfield in the South Pacific?

** This is a link to Leif Peng's Blog on illustration art titled "Today's Inspiration."   It is an endless and priceless source of information from which I have benefited many times over again and am forever grateful for.

Interview with WDR by Andrew Stasik, July 1999

     Family, friends and fans of Wally should feel fortunate that Andrew Stasik* conducted this interview with Wally.  It's not the only one I've found, but it is the last interview he gave that I know of: he was 92 years, 5 months old.  Stasik does a stellar job in capturing some of Grandpa's humor and the kind of stories he liked to tell.  It is found in the booklet handed out during his last exhibition which was titled "Walter DuBois Richards: A Career Spanning Seven Decades."  The exhibition was held at the Connecticut Graphic Arts Center in Norwalk.

-- Please note: These are the remaining pictures found in the exhibition booklet, and for this particular post, are not always meant to correspond directly with the text immediately surrounding them. --


AS:  Walter, tell us about the first print you made.


WDR:  The first print, I'm quite sure, was the linocut, The Black Mantle.  And I did it for the Cleveland Museum's May Show in 1931, the year I graduated from art school.  We didn't study printmaking in school.


AS:  You then created a number of linocuts before turning to lithography.

WDR:  Yes, this was largely due to the Cleveland Print Market and it's publishing program called Print-A-Month.


AS:  Were you commissioned to print an edition for distribution?


WDR:  No, they would select from my proofs, purchase the block and have it printed.  The work of a different artist was selected for each month of the year.  Some of the artists were good printers and they were hired to pull the editions which were 250, plus 10 impressions for the artist.


AS:  You then went on to make lithographs.  Was that in Cleveland?


WDR:  Stevan Dohanos and I tried a little in Cleveland.  But later we went to study lithography with Stow Wengenroth in Eastport, Maine.


AS:  I've never read about Stow teaching.  What else do you remember of your visit?


WDR:  Stow had a press set up at a summer school run by the president of the American Watercolor Society.  He taught us how to use litho pencils and crayons.  Anyway, that's where we really got started.


AS:  Did you do anything else besides lithography?

WDR:  We painted watercolors.  I remember we were sketching and I was walking along and a bumble bee went up my pants leg, I lay down, pulled up my pants and the buzz stopped.  At that moment a bird let fly some dropping, right on Steve's painting.  Steve said I put a little water on it and made a cloud with it!


AS:  Do you remember anything about Stow Wengenroth that you can share with us?


WDR:  He was a quiet guy and a good teacher.


AS:  Did he actually print for you when you were there at the school?


WDR:  No, we all printed our own stuff.


AS:  Did you ever try making lithographs by first drawing on transfer paper?  Do you know what that is?  You draw with a greasy crayon or pencil on paper and then use the press to transfer the grease from the paper to the stone.

WDR:  No.  I always drew directly on the stone.


AS:  You weren't bothered by the fact that the print is a mirror image?


WDR:  No.  I first traced my outline drawing onto the stone using dragon's blood powder.  Then I rendered the image with litho crayons and pencils.


AS:  Some of your prints have been printed by offset lithography.  Did you want to make cheaper reproductions?


WDR:  They are mostly used as my Christmas cards.  They were printed by local commercial printshops.




AS:  I think one of the unique things you have done is to have created illustrations for ads using lithography.  You used lithography to create what then became the image for a Cadillac advertisement.


WDR:  I also drew with litho crayons on a smooth illustration board to produce drawings and illustrations.  That's the way I got the effect we wanted.


AS:  They're beautiful.  I wonder if Stow Wengenroth ever used one of his lithographs in an advertisement?


WDR:  He didn't approve.


AS:  Really? Did he ever say something to you?


WDR:  He was a member of the National Academy, print section.  I was a member of (the) watercolor section.  He kind of resented the fact that I wiped tones with a chamois.  He never wiped a tone in his life - he hated them.


AS:  You are unlike most illustrators as you have made prints throughout your career.  You have made over 100 lithographs and several linoleum cuts.  Why?


WDR:  Well, it was easier to sell them.  If you sell one original painting, it's gone, but it's not so with prints.  I had fun doing them and I could pick up a little money between illustration assignments.


AS:  What prompted you to make lithographs at George Miller's establishment in Manhattan?

WDR:  I had moved East, and I think it was probably Stow Wengenroth, who introduced me to George Miller and his son, Burr.


AS:  Do you remember George Miller at all?


WDR:  Not much.  Most of my work was printed by Burr and his son, Steve.


AS:  So many artists like to tell stories of having to carry their stones back to the Miller shop.  After you moved to Connecticut, did you still have to bring the stones back to New Canaan and then take them back to the city?


WDR:  Yes.  One winter I remember I had this stone and I caught the commuter train into New York and I set the stone right beside me forgetting about the radiator of the train.  The heat transferred all the pattern of the cardboard to my drawing.  I  guess I had to do that stone over again.  Once the head of Alcoa aluminum had his chauffeur pick me up.  He was dictating letters in the back seat of the car to New York.  After he was dropped off at his office, the chauffeur took me and the stones to the print shop.


AS:  Did you ever get to use any other printers besides the Millers?


WDR:  Not in New York.  I worked a few times in the 1980s with Randy Folkman who lives a few miles from here.


AS:  The etcher, Gerald Geerlings, lived less than a half mile from you.  It's so unusual to find two major printmakers living just a few blocks from each other in a small town.

WDR:  I knew him.  That was all.


AS:  Walter, did you begin your career as an illustrator immediately upon graduation from art school?


WDR:  Not quite.  The summer after I graduated I taught soap carving in the Cleveland playgrounds.  Jessie Owens, the Negro athlete who had trouble with Hitler, was there while I was teaching.  I didn't teach him anything, but he was around.


AS:  You then moved on to Chicago.


WDR:  It was Larry Stultz, one of the partners of an advertising agency, who helped get me started.  I had a little studio space on the river facing the Wrigley Building.  This was the Depression and in the morning I'd come to work and the police boats were fishing out bodies of stockbrokers who had jumped in the river the night before.   I didn't make any prints in Chicago, but I did some illustrations for Child Life Magazine and the book Teepee and Wigwam.  The Field Museum had a good collection where I researched the stuff for this book.  I also worked for the Sundblom Studios, famous for the Coca-Cola Santa Claus.  Sunny Sundblom could paint with either hand.


AS:  Can you think of any particularly interesting experience you had in Chicago?


WDR:  In those days when a new show came into town, some of the chorus girls would come up and want to get jobs posing as models.  We used to shoot a lot of film of these models with no film in the camera.


AS:  You also used lithography to create your book illustrations.


WDR:  While I was still in Cleveland, I entered the Limited Editions book competition, which included lithographs and linocuts, and I came in sixth in the nation.  The books were all exhibited on Fifth Avenue in the headquarters of the Limited Editions Club.  When Steve Dohanos learned about the show he took Charles Cooper up to see it.  Chuck, Steve and Jon Whitcomb decided that they would invite me to join their agency in New York.  I remember Jon Whitcomb was on his way back to New York from visiting his family in Columbus when he asked me to come to New York.


AS:  You have had a long and productive career in Cleveland, Chicago and New York City with assignments taking you around the world.


WDR:  I also lived and worked in Woodstock, New York, as well as Old Greenwich and here in New Canaan, Connecticut.


AS:  In your work as illustrator, painter, stamp designer and printmaker, the images are forceful in the way that they project.  How would you comment on that?


WDR:  I think that my early linocut prints had a lot to do with my thinking simply.  Just the pattern, black and white and later the qualities of light and shade.


AS:  Did you ever use photographs?


WDR:  Often.  I took lots of pictures.  You couldn't sit in the middle of a runway and make a painting or lithograph.  The thing I liked to do was to sit down in front of a subject whatever it was, sketch it, take my camera and shoot the same thing I was looking at.  Then, I used the photograph to finish it later.

AS:  You have printed over a hundred editions.  Many have been extremely popular and are now sold out.


WDR:  I sold a lot.  Mostly it was due to the subject matter.


AS:  New Canaan and the Long Island Sound have provided you handsomely.


WDR:  There are only a few places in the world where this would work.

AS:  What was the great attraction of Green's Ledge?


WDR:  Well, when you come out of the Five Mile River, you run into it.  There was always something interesting about it.  My images helped get it designated as a national landmark.


AS:  You have had extensive recognition and won numerous awards for your art over the years.  Do you have a special feeling for one work in particular?

WDR:  One of the most interesting things that did happen to me was with the linocut, Woodcutters.  I did it in Cleveland when I was just starting out as an illustrator with the Tranquillini studios.  It appeared in a recent publication of the Smithsonian Institution.


AS:  It's a catalog of the best in their collection.


WDR:  Durer is in there, and Rembrandt.  I remember I followed Rembrandt.  And I did that print when I was just starting out, I was sort of a kid.  It's funny how things happen.


*To give credit where credit is due, I've included Andrew Stasik's name and the non-profit organization he worked for (and might still).  It is hard for me to express the gratitude I feel toward Mr. Stasik for taking the time to conduct this interview.  I looked and did not find a website for the Graphic Arts Center.  I did find the following description on an unrelated website:  "The Connecticut Graphics Arts Center was founded in 1995 as a non-profit, multi-media studio workshop and gallery devoted to the creation of original prints, photographs, artists' books and related disciplines through its year-round workshops conducted by nationally recognized master printers.  Visitors may see changing exhibitions, and view artists making prints.  Free."  The Connecticut Graphic Arts Center is located in Mathews Park, 299 West Avenue, Norwalk, CT.

A Biography of Walter DuBois Richards by Helen Barnett

     It is my goal to someday write my own in depth biography of both Walter and Glenora Richards.   But I've decided to include the biography that co-curator Helen Barnett of the Connecticut Graphic Arts Center* wrote for Wally's exhibition in my blog because it is so far the best I've read or found in my efforts researching his career.  Besides being well thought out and organized, it is clear she did her homework, including material she obtained by interviewing both Walter and his wife Glenora.  I am thankful that she did this.

Helen Barnett:

     "To telescope the nearly seventy-year career of Walter DuBois Richards, lithographer, painter, designer, illustrator, and teacher into these few paragraphs and illustrations would be frustrating were it not for the accompanying retrospective exhibition.  Viewers will be treated to this phenomenal output and to the scope of his skill in portraying people for magazine editorial and advertising illustrations; in his stunning lithographs of sailing vessels, superb architectural renderings and subtle watercolors.  

     Walter was born on September 18, 1907, in Penfield, Ohio, a small town southeast of Cleveland.  The grandson of a farmer and the son of a high school biology teacher in Rocky River where he grew up, he credits his father's interest in the natural sciences for his own love of nature.  The time he spent at the family cottage on Pun-in-Bay on Lake Erie developed another love - of water, a subject he so eloquently captured throughout his life.  

     After graduating from high school in 1925, he needed money for art school and landed a job as a surveyor. Although untrained in that field he called upon his math and geometry skills as well as his fine draftsmanship to produce accurate calculations and sketches.  That grasp of geometry may account for his later excellent architectural drawings.  "Sometimes I wish I had become an architect," he has mused.


     In 1930 he graduated with honors and a special scholarship from the Cleveland School of Art.  He spent the summer teaching soap carving on the city's playgrounds, a program directed by the Cleveland Board of Education.  Then Walter borrowed $300 from his father and set off for Chicago where he served an apprenticeship at the prestigious Sundblom Art Studio.  The five apprentices were given cab money to deliver artwork, instead they walked and used the money for lunches.  "It was the height of the depression," he recalled, "and I was lucky, especially because there were 40 or more other artists who wanted that position."


     During his eight-month stint he took night classes in life drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago and made a series of illustrations for a children's book, Teepee and Wigwam, after doing much research at the Field Museum.  However, as apprentices were being rotated, he decided to return to Ohio in search of a salary and a bride.  He married Glenora Case whom he had met in art school.  She was doing 20-minute sketches for 25 cents apiece at a Cleveland department store.  Later she would become internationally noted for her miniature paintings.


     In 1931 he joined the Tranquillini Studios in Cleveland where he met Stevan Dohanos who was to become his life-long friend and professional colleague.  He was with the studio until 1936, during which time he also made a number of lithographs and linocuts for his own enjoyment.  On a trip to Maine with Dohanos to study with Stow Wengenroth he produced a number of lithographs, linocuts and watercolors, scenes of Eastport.


     Though his career as an illustrator and painter/printmaker in Cleveland was moving along, the lure of New York became even more appealing when Steve Dohanos left to join the Charles E. Cooper Studios there.  In 1935 Walter entered a Limited Editions Club competition with a book he had illustrated and designed.  He quite proudly admits that he came in sixth in the nation and had the work exhibited in a Fifth Avenue gallery.  "Steve took Cooper to see my work and it resulted in my being offered a position," he says.  In 1936 he and Glennie packed up and headed East, living in New York at first where she says, "Wally often worked all night and I sometimes slept on the studio couch until he had finished an assignment."



     Cooper Studios had major accounts and Walter's facile drawing and suberb draftsmanship are evident in advertising illustrations for Cadillac, Ford, and Chevrolet.  Often he had to make finished sketches from photographs of cars still on the assembly line.  In that highly charged competitive environment, his work was much in demand.  "It was the golden age of illustration," he says of the 1920s to the 1950s.  He had the ability to convey any emotion, whether of a glamorous model at a cocktail party or a victom in a gripping murder scene.  These drawings appeared not only in advertisements but as editorial features in Life, Look, Colliers, Argosy, Reader's Digest, This Week, Outdoor Life and American Legion Magazine.


     He left Cooper studios in 1950 and joined Stevan Lyon Studio **(Oops!  I think she meant the ad agency, Stephan Lion Inc., another studio with a similar name in NYC, but a half century older.)** continuing to make illustrations.  He also became an official historian/painter for the U.S. Air Force, traveling around the world - to Germany where he made a watercolor of the Berlin Wall; to Laos, France, Ecuador, and Vietnam where he photographed the horrors of war for use in several paintings, one of which was formally presented to President Johnson at a White House ceremony.  Earlier he had made a painting of the President being sworn into office aboard Air Force One.  


     His extraordinary ability to render portraits, nature and architecture was never more evident than in his designs for thirty-seven U.S. postage stamps, which included the Beautification of America series, the American Bald Eagle, and a twelve-stamp architectural series ranging from Thomas Jefferson's Rotunda at the University of Virginia to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.  


     Though a globe-trotter and nationally noted artist, Walter has called Connecticut home since he and Glenora moved to Old Greenwich, and then to New Canaan [Connecticut] where they have lived since 1941.  Their sons Timothy and Henry were reared there and have often recalled that they were sometimes enlisted to pose in various costumes - as cave men, or Martians, or tight rope walkers - for their father's magazine illustrations.  


     Walter has been called a "town treasure" by his legion of admirers, not only for his teaching and guidance, but because he has been the visual and nostalgic chronicler of New Canaan.  In his favorite medium, lithography, he has recorded the old railroad station, the library, Waveny Mansion and the parks in spring and winter.  This work was further lauded in a 1982 Connecticut Society of Architects' Award for Enviromental Improvement which cited him as "one of Connecticut's most respected painters and illustrators whose lithographs, watercolors and drawings have fostered pride in our heritage and have helped preserve historic buildings for future generations."  


     This recognition is only one in a very long list of awards and prizes Walter has recieved since he first exhibited in the 1933 May Show at the Cleveland Art Museum.  He was given the highest award there in lithography for four consecutive years, 1933 to 1936.  In 1937 six of his lithographs and two linocuts were included in the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition, Paintings and Prints by Cleveland Artists.  The same year he participated in an international exhibition in Paris, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art.  In 1966 his work was included in Two Hundred Years of Watercolor Painting in America at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and ten years later, in Two Hundred Years of American Illustration at the New York Historical Society.  


     His most recent accolade was the selection of his 1935 linoleum cut, Woodcutters, for inclusion in the catalogue Prints at the Smithsonian, the Origins of a National Collection, published in conjunction with an exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution in the Hall of Graphic Arts.  He was, in good company, "along with Durer and Rembrandt."

     *To give credit where credit is due, I've included Helen Barnett's name and the non-profit organization she worked for in 1999 (and might still).  I looked and did not find a website for the Graphic Arts Center.  I did find the following description on an unrelated website:  "The Connecticut Graphics Arts Center was founded in 1995 as a non-profit, multi-media studio workshop and gallery devoted to the creation of original prints, photographs, artists' books and related disciplines through its year-round workshops conducted by nationally recognized master printers.  Visitors may see changing exhibitions, and view artists making prints.  Free."  The Connecticut Graphic Arts Center is located in Mathews Park, 299 West Avenue, Norwalk, CT.

An Introduction to Wally's 1999 Exhibition by Howard Munce

     In 1999, Wally held his last major exhibition at the Connecticut Graphic Arts Center* in Norwalk, Connecticut.  Called "Walter DuBois Richards: A Career Spanning Seven Decades," it was a collection of his works that ran roughly from the 1920s through the 1980s.  

 


     I didn't attend the event, instead I was in Costa Rica participating in a college study abroad program at the UCR.  However, I was able to hold onto at least one of the booklets from the exhibition. After re-discovering it, I enjoyed the introduction, biography and interview of WDR so much that I've decided to re-print them over the next three blog entries. 
     Howard Munce, the Honorary President for the Society of Illustrators wrote the introduction.  He skillfully articulates Walter DuBois Richards life and career in a brief but gracious way.  Here it is verbatim from the 1999 exhibition booklet:


     "For those who erroneously regard illustrators as lesser artists, they can be set straight by perusing the lifetime output of Walter DuBois Richards: Wally.
     There are some illustrators who dream of and speak of the day they can put commercial work behind them and "paint."  Wally Richards never waited for that day; he spent years at a drawing board as an illustrator, then spent every spare day he could manage out of doors doing watercolors and visiting museums. 
     He followed this regimen from his early days in Cleveland through his successful days at the renowned Cooper Studios in New York.  His vacations became painting vacations.
     In 1948, along with colleagues Stevan Dohanos and Hardie Gramatky, he organized the Fairfield Watercolor Group, which consisted of a dozen painters and illustrators who felt as he did about picture making beyond magazine and advertising work.  They met once a month at each other's houses with a new painting and were critiqued by the other eleven.
     Wally was the first president of the group and has never been out of office since.  Many other members have come and,  alas, gone.  Not he.  Meantime, all during his mature years he produced lithographs, an exacting and demanding discipline.  To add to the difficulty of working in reverse, there is the problem of working with greasy soft crayons that must constantly be sharpened and deftly applied to a delicate stone surface.  One needs a sturdy heart and a steady hand in this no-man's land of no erasures.  He has both.  
     Over the years Wally has recorded many landmark buildings in New Canaan [Connecticut] and environs.  His prints hang in scores of area homes, and he has made Green's Ledge Light in Long Island Sound his personal model.  He has rendered this landmark in all the many moods that sky and water and weather can offer.  His ability to portray expanses of water in any medium is unique.  In addition to capturing the many looks of the sea's surface, he is also able to express the mighty lift and swell of it.
     Still another of Wally's accomplishments is his contribution to the U.S. Postal Design Program.  He has designed and executed 37 stamps.  
     Now at the age of 92, Wally is hampered a bit by sight problems but that hasn't stopped him from working or teaching or zeroing in on the weakness or the strength of the output of others.
     Welcome to the work of a superb talent expended to the nth degree."  
     - Howard Munce, Honorary President, Society of Illustrators


*I looked and did not find a website for the Graphic Arts Center in Norwalk.  I did find the following description on an unrelated website:  "The Connecticut Graphics Arts Center was founded in 1995 as a non-profit, multi-media studio workshop and gallery devoted to the creation of original prints, photographs, artists' books and related disciplines through its year-round workshops conducted by nationally recognized master printers.  Visitors may see changing exhibitions, and view artists making prints.  Free."  The Connecticut Graphic Arts Center is located in Mathews Park, 299 West Avenue, Norwalk, CT.

Walter DuBois Richards' 22nd Stamp: Massachusetts State House In Boston

     For personal reasons, The State House in Boston is one of my favorite buildings that Walter DuBois Richards had decided to profile for his American Architecture Series.  It was completed 1798 and designed by the father of Federalist architecture, Charles Bulfinch.  He was also a principal architect of the Capital Building in Washington, D.C.  It's interesting that Wally decided to portray the pre-WWI State House design, excluding the two white wings that are now part of the modern State House.     

     The first day of Issue was launched in Kansas City, Missouri, of all places, on June 4, 1979.  Each stamp in the block of four stamps sold for $.15.  Wally had just completed his 20th thru 23rd stamps at the young age of 72.  His foray into producing a small mountain of 36 stamps in 15 years (when you exclude the Post Card in 1987, his 37th 'stamp') seemed an appropriate way to finish his rather illustrious career as an American artist.  

     It was nice of him to send me this first day of issue stamp with a short note, considering I was just 26 months old.  I am glad he did and fortunately it has survived the years, and now I may give it to my children when they're ready.  Someday they may get a kick out of it, or perhaps collect stamps themselves. 

Thanks Grandpa!