The 1946 Directory of United States Illustrators

     This was a great discovery in a box of old books: a compact beat-up binder titled "Official Directory of American Advertising Artists and Illustrators 1946." 

   
     It is more than just a directory of advertising artists and illustrators from that year (or decade depending on how you want to look at it).  

     This booklet reveals a bundle of interesting tidbits of information about illustration art in general.  For example, a short study of its 'Types of Art Work' illuminates how a collection of specific disciplines and their sub-categories together defined the broad field of illustration art in the 1940s.

Walter D. Richards, Illustrator #617

     I gather this tasty glimpse into the business side of American illustration holds credence because of its three primary authors:  The Society of Illustrators, The Art Directors Club N.Y., and The Artists Guild.  That said, of the 104 'representatives' and 826 artists listed, the vast majority of the artists and art studios are in New York City and Chicago.  Three from San Francisco are listed and two from both Los Angeles and Cleveland.  Westport (CT), Dallas, Detroit, Brooklyn and Washington D.C. each had one listing.


     Hmmmm.  I've read that even by the 1940s a very large portion of all advertising in the United States (probably the world for that matter) was hand drawn.  You'd think there'd've been more than 104 entities representing at least one artist in the country.  Then again, when you see the list of companies a label like the Charles E. Cooper Studio held as clients, maybe 104 'representatives' is realistic.


     But enough of this boring rumination.  For the fun of it, I've typed out each category and sub-category that is found in the directory.  Eventually, I would like to include the number of corresponding artists in each discipline.  I think there is some fun in the statistics.  Better yet, there might be someone reading this who is actually qualified (not me) to have an opinion or observation about it.

  7 Types of Illustration and 132 Sub-Categories


Illustration: 96 sub-categories ____ artists (numbers to be added later)
     Abstracts:
     Accessories (men's shoes):
     Adventure: 
     Advertising: 
     Airbrush: 
     Americana: See Historical
     Airplanes (aviation):
     Animals:
     Animation:
     Architectural:
     Art:
     Automobiles:
     Birds-Eye: See Outdoors
     Black and White:
     Book:
     Calenders:
     Cartoons:
     Character:
     Children:
     Color:
     Commercial Art:
     Comprehensives:
     Composition:
     Continuities:
     Cosmetics:
     Covers:
     Crayon:
     Decorative:
     Diagrams:  See Technical
     Drybrush:
     Drawings:
     Editorial:
     Fantasy:
     Fashion:
     Fiction:
     Figures:
     Fine Arts: 
     Finished Art:
     Flowers:
     Furniture:
     General:
     Genre:
     Girls:
     Glamour:
     Gnomes:
     Heads:
     Historical:
     Housefurnishings:
     Human Interest:
     Humor:
     Imaginative:
     Illustration:
     Informative:
     Industrial:
     Interiors:
     Magazine:
     Marine:
     Mechanical:
     Medical:
     Merchandise:
     Military:
     Modern:
     Monochrome:
     Murals:
     Music Interpretation:
     Object:
     Oil:
     Oriental:
     Outdoors:
     Painting:
     Pastels:
     Pictorial:
     Portraits:
     Products:
     Realistic:
     Scratchboard:
     Sea Subjects:
     Serious:
     Shoes:
     Sketches:
     Sports:
     Spot:
     Still-Life:
     Story:
     Strips:
     Stylized:
     Surrealist:
     Symbolic:
     Technical:
     Teenage:
     Tempera:
     Textiles:
     Wash:
     Watercolor:
     Western Action:
     Woodcut:


Design: 21 sub-categories ____ Artists
     Book:
     Calligraphy:
     Cartographers:
     Coats-of-Arms:
     Decoration:
     Design:
     Engrossing:
     Graphic:
     Heraldry:
     Humorous:
     Industrial:
     Jewerly:
     Labels:
     Layout:
     Lettering:
     Letterheads:
     Maps: 
     Packaging:
     Trade-Mark:
     Symbolic:
     Typographical:


Posters & Displays: ____ Artists


Art Direction: ____ Artists
     Art Director:
     Catalog:
     Complete Advertisement:
     Consultant:
     Creative:
     Visualizer:


Retouching:  ____ Artists
     Color:
     Retouching:


General: ____ Artists
     Commercial Art, Presentation, Rendering:


Sculpture: ____ Artists
     Clay Modeling:
     Moulage:
     Paper Sculpture:
     Sculpture:


What percentage of the artists are in each category ____?
What percentage of the artists are in each sub-category ____?

1941 Cadillac Fleetwood Advertisement

     In an earlier post about a Cadillac fighter plane illustration I had played with the idea that Wally did a great deal of work for General Motors during World War II because of his experience doing illustrations for Cadillac in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  Here is one of those illustrations.

     While a specific date is no where to be found on this illustration, I would guess it is Cadillac's series 67/75 Fleetwood limousine.  It was introduced in 1941 as one of Cadillac's premiere luxury vehicles.  Here's the wikipedia take on this series.  

     What is also interesting about this illustration is that it is a color proving stock for Fortune Magazine, where it was published.  This scan below is the backside to the above illustration for Cadillac.  

     Someday, when I can find the time, I'd love to know more about what this proving stock really is, and what role did it play for Fortune Magazine.  Furthermore, why did my grandfather have this in his possession?

Daniel Boone Never Heard Of Logistics: the AAR in 1950

     Walter Richards made this illustration of Daniel Boone for the Association of American Railroads in 1950.

     The exact date for the publication is unknown.  On the following side of this illustration the date 1950 can be seen.

     My father found two of these illustration magazine clippings that either Wally or his wife had set aside as an illustration Wally had done.

     

     

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.