On Vacation

Another period of silence can be expected as your correspondent will be following the route of the Great Western Railway to sunny Kernow. If it stops raining for long enough there may even be the opportunity for a picnic as shown in this only slightly idealised image. Even on a picnic, the table settings must be just right and follow best practice as displayed in this fine painting by Liz Bruce (who has kindly given her permission for its inclusion here).

Celebrity Endorsement – the Hollywood Female

Today it’s the turn of the female of the species to prove that when it comes to scattering their star quality far and wide, they have nothing to learn from the men. Hollywood’s finest were as much in demand as their male counterparts and had a key role to play in promoting cigarette smoking as a respectable activity for women. Both Joan Crawford and Lucille Ball were happy to endorse rival brands to demonstrate their impartiality. Deeply contrasting personalities, it could be argued that Crawford’s expression of barely suppressed anguish could have undermined the message whilst Lucille’s cheerfully vacuous features could have been made to order. Disturbingly, in the ad for Pall Mall, Lucille bears a strong resemblance to our own much loved New Labour politician, Hazel Blears. The gloves are a nice touch when it comes to smoking Chesterfield. James Rosenquist cropped the Crawford ad for Camel for his 1964 painting, Untitled (Joan Crawford Says), now in the collection of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

There can be no dispute about the charms of Royal Crown Cola with stars of the calibre of Rita Hayworth and Paulette Goddard on board. A femme fatale such as Gilda would have died of thirst before she let a drop of Royal Crown Cola pass her lips and would have made an unwholesome candidate for endorsing the product. Essential then that Rita steps out of character and assumes a breezily carefree persona quite at odds with her screen roles.

Celebrity Endorsement – the Hollywood Male

The undisputed number one endorsement slut would have to be Bob Hope. Hope’s promiscuity has been expertly chronicled by Chris Mullen at his Visual Telling of Stories (VTS) website. Bing Crosby was never far behind and VTS has many entertaining examples of Bing spreading himself thin. The vast majority of Hollywood stars who lent their prestige to the advertising industry in the Forties and Fifties are no longer with us but Kirk Douglas is one who survives to this day which is as good a reason as any for including him here. This type of publicity is still enormously popular with advertisers and when hunting for celebrities they continue to fish in the same pools – the world of sport and entertainment.

Billboard Artists – All American Heroes

The bill poster/painter was the last link in the chain in the display of commercial imagery that is such a distinguishing feature of the Great American Landscape. Antonio Petruccelli’s magnificent May 1937 cover for Fortune magazine portrays the billboard artists as authentic all-American heroes. Their high altitude brushwork giving pictorial form to perfect expressions of the art of selling. It was a job with a high mortality rate but against all the odds it still survives. To read about a practitioner in New Hampshire please click here. There are also those who employ traditional skills for the purpose of subverting outdoor advertising; to read about their activities, please click here.


Stevan Dohanos was a master of American illustration and a regular on the cover of Saturday Evening Post. There is much more about him at the Alphabet of Illustrators. Dohanos had a great eye for the vernacular and in this scene from 1957 two blue-collar sons of toil refresh themselves in a break from the task of painting an ad for air-conditioning in the middle of a summer heatwave. This cover was a companion piece to one he produced in 1948 that can be seen at Curtis Publishing. The third image is a 1950 magazine ad for Schlitz – the Beer that made Milwaukee Famous. One of a long series of ads on the same theme, the joke here is that the bill poster succumbs to the power of his own advertising and takes his first step on the slippery slope to ruin. Finally, at the Prelinger Archives a splendid film (To Market, To Market) can be viewed on the subject. Part 1 is an invaluable, if long-winded guide to the “scientific” approach to outdoor advertising while Part 2 (in colour and briefer) shows the posters and their installation.

Marilyn Monroe

Today’s treat is a trip down the road of celebrity endorsement in the glamorous company of twentieth century icon, Marilyn Monroe. Avoiding the inducements of the tobacco industry, Monroe gave her blessing to the rather more innocuous products of Westmore Hollywood Cosmetics. Dating from 1952 and 1954, the ads are tied in to forthcoming films, “Niagara” and “River of No Return”. These are among the earlier appearances of an image that would in the future become one of the most widely appropriated in human history. In design terms they are undistinguished but they mark the transition in representation from cheerful curvaceous blonde in 1952 to amorous temptress with parted lips two years later. To explore the world of celebrity endorsement in more detail there’s no better place than the Visual Telling of Stories where Chris Mullen presides over an abundance of extraordinary imagery.

John Falter (1910-1982)

John Falter was a famously productive American illustrator whose prime came in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Between 1943 and 1962 his work regularly appeared on the cover of Saturday Evening Post where his genre scenes of American life in the cities, small towns and suburbia reflected a familiar world to the readership without the sentimentality that Norman Rockwell brought to the scene. For a comprehensive overview of Falter, the Alphabet of Illustrators is the place to visit.


These images come from a wartime advertising campaign for Pall Mall cigarettes for which Falter supplied the illustrations. The basis of the campaign was that Pall Mall represents all that’s best in contemporary cigarette design and manufacture and that, in comparison, rival brands are positively anachronistic. Falter’s brief was to devise a series of images in which servicemen demonstrate the superiority of Pall Mall to their colleagues with a simple visual aid. From the staff car to the firing range, from the aircraft hangar to the coastal battery, the argument raged. It is, of course, an exclusively masculine universe and there lingers a faint but unmistakable homoerotic frisson about the body language on display. An ungenerous observer might wonder how they made time for the rigours of battle.


“Design, brother, modern design is plenty important!” It’s a diverting thought that the American fighting man felt passionately about standards in contemporary design and even in the heat of battle would debate the relative merits of Walter Dorwin Teague and Norman Bel Geddes. This was not the copy-writer’s finest moment especially when competitors were successfully enlisting the stars of Hollywood in support of their products and employing cruder but more effective graphic devices in which to showcase their offerings. Ever the professional, Falter brought his full repertoire of skills in handling colour and tone to the task with nothing less than complete conviction.

Meccano Magazine on the rails

This is yet another selection of cover art from Meccano Magazine (1926 – 1930), this time celebrating the world of train travel. The development of steam traction was at the forefront of technological innovation and the train operators competed ruthlessly to achieve ever higher speeds. Readers were invited to stare with wide-eyed wonder at the sight of massive locomotives being manoeuvred around vast workshops as if they were weightless. The enormous bulk of American locomotives are displayed for the admiration of the British schoolboy. Rich in detail, with lots of highly polished machined metallic surfaces to delight the eye. In keeping with the mission of the magazine, most of the images focus on what happens behind the scenes and only two make the effort to communicate the sense of speed that was such a contemporary obsession.