Illustrating for Love or Money... 'til Death Do Us Part

In his autobiography, "My Adventures as an Illustrator," Norman Rockwell writes about his friend, Coles Phillips:

"Coles never painted anything but pretty girls. He used to get marvelous prices for his work, as much as, if not more than, any other 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."



"Coles didn't decide to be an artist until he'd finished college. And he'd already decided that he was going to make a hundred thousand dollars before he was thirty-five. As he was a very smart fellow (I always felt he would have risen far whatever line of work he'd chosen), he did become an artist and he did make a hundred thousand dollars before he was thirty-five. (And he married a very beautiful girl, too)."



Using our handy inflation calculator we can quickly determine that Coles Phillips made over 1.2 million dollars from his art before he was thirty-five. His 1920s illustration fee of $2,000 would be over $23,000 today.

At that same time, Norman Rockwell was himself beginning to earn some very decent money. He describes one ad campaign he began in 1921 - a series of twelve paintings for Orange Crush - which paid him $300 per painting. While nowhere near the kind of money Coles Phillips was earning, it was a very good fee at a time when the average family income was only about $1,200 per year. "It seemed like such a lot of money that I couldn't resist." wrote Rockwell. And Orange Crush was only one of his advertising clients at that time. He was also receiving assignments from Willys Overland car Company, Fisk Bicycle Tires, Coca-Cola and Jello.



Besides all this ad work, Rockwell was doing magazine illustrations and covers for many magazine clients, most famously for George Lorimer, the legendary editor of the Saturday Evening Post (shown at his desk below).



In 1924 the art director of Post rival, Liberty magazine, came to Rockwell's studio to offer him double the fee he was getting at the Post if he would jump ship. Because of his strong sense of loyalty to Mr. Lorimer, Rockwell refused. But his wife insisted that he confront Mr. Lorimer and insist on a substantial raise. Rockwell had been illustrating covers for the Post for eight years at that point and his fee, $250, had never risen more than nominally. When Rockwell visited Lorimer and described the situation with Liberty magazine's offer, Lorimer doubled his rate. He also advised Rockwell to charge his advertising clients twice his Post cover rate.

Its not surprising then that, at a time when the average annual family income was just over a thousand dollars, Rockwell describes being able to put ten times that amount into savings in a matter of months.

Liberty magazine's publisher may have failed to sway Norman Rockwell's loyalty to George Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post... but the demon of temptation proved too powerful for another illustrator - Rockwell's friend, Leslie Thrasher. Rockwell writes that Thrasher "painted one of the most famous Post covers ever published. I still get letters from people who think I did it. It depicts a lady and a butcher standing on either side of a scale in which lay a chicken. The lady was pushing up on the scale; the butcher was pushing down. The cover appeared on 3 October, 1936."



"Some months later Thrasher came to my studio asking advice about an offer Liberty magazine had made to him. It was a five-year contract calling for Thrasher to do fifty covers a year at one thousand dollars a piece. "I can live on ten thousand dollars a year," said Thrasher, "so I can save forty thousand. At the end of five years I'll have two hundred thousand dollars. I'll be well off and secure for the rest of my life."



"I told him I didn't think he or anybody else could do fifty covers for even one year, let alone five. "Don't accept," I said. "You'll work yourself to death. And after the contract runs out, what'll you do? Nobody else will want your stuff." Well, he didn't know; maybe maybe it wouldn't be so bad; he thought he'd give it a try. And he went ahead and signed the contract."



"Liberty dreamed up a family around which Thrasher was to build his series (I forget the details; mother, father, children, and grandparents - something like that), and he set to work. One cover a week. He didn't last a year."



"After eight or nine months his house burned and he was so run-down and tired from overwork that he caught pneumonia and died."



"But the poor guy would never have lasted the full five years anyway. No man could have. Fifty covers a year? That's just too much."



"I still hesitate a bit between yes and no when somebody offers me a fat contract. Then I think of Leslie Thrasher and I can't say no quickly enough. security is very nice, but not if you have to kill yourself or your work to get it. Same with money."



* The text quoted today, the Norman Rockwell orange Crush ad, the photo of George Lorimer and the third Coles Phillips illustration are all from the book, "Norman Rockwell - My Adventures as an Illustrator" ©1979 Curtis Publishing Co.

* Thanks to Heritage Auctions for allowing me to use several of their scans of Leslie Thrasher originals in today's post.

* The scans of Thrasher's Post cover was found at mymags.com

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How to Be a Millionaire in 1950... and Not Be One Today

Here is my first ever published illustration that appeared in a national magazine. It was done during the summer of 1986, between my second and third year at art college.



I will always be grateful to the art director at Canadian Business magazine who took a chance and gave a kid with what was clearly a student portfolio a shot at doing his first professional work. I was paid $275 dollars for this spot illustration. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Suffice it to say, I'd have happily done the job for free.



In the years after graduating from college I did many, many more spot illustrations for many other magazines, books and newspapers. There was a time when magazine (or "editorial") art represented a substantial portion of my income. Depending on the size and scope of the work, whether it was for a consumer or trade publication, and whether that publication had local, national or international distribution, you could expect to make anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars for a single magazine illustration.

I don't really do very much of this sort of work any more, but my impression is that the fees for editorial illustration have remained largely flat over the last twenty years. I also have the feeling that there are far more illustrators than assignments in the editorial art market.



Advertising illustrations, of which I also did many during the 1980s and '90s, paid much better. I typically received fees starting around $2,500 for a single piece of ad art and I believe the highest payment I ever received was in the neighbourhood of $12,000. I knew and worked with several other (far more) important, established Canadian illustrators and heard numbers in that price range mentioned many times.

Among friends who worked for American clients through their reps in New York, it was not uncommon to hear that clients sometimes paid twenty, thirty or close to $50,000 for a single piece of advertising art.

Fifty thousand dollars! Needless to say, assignments with that kind of budget don't drop into an illustrator's lap every week.

But 60 years ago, they did - into Albert Dorne's lap. Every week.



From a March 1950 article in Collier's magazine about the Famous Artists School, we learn that all twelve members of the founding faculty were earning an average of $75,000 a year.



With the exception of FAS founder and president, Albert Dorne, whom the article says was paid as much as $5,000 per advertising illustration and who made $100,000 a year.



Using any one of a number of online currency converters, we can quickly recalculate Dorne's income as being nearly one million dollars per year when adjusted for 60 years of inflation. His $5,000 ad art fee comes to $46,436.23 in 2011 dollars.



To make the 1950 equivalent of a million bucks a year at that rate, Dorne would have had to do an advertising illustrations every other week. He often did 5 illustrations a day. Of course not every assignment was an ad piece. The Collier's article tells us Dorne received only $1,000 for magazine story illustrations. Or, in terms more relevant to us, a mere $9,287.25 in 2011 dollars.



Now there's no denying how exceptional Albert Dorne was - both as an illustrator of prolific output and as a savvy, tireless, business-minded entrepreneur. But consider how many other illustrators enjoyed even a fraction of Al Dorne's success and its easy to imagine that the equivalent of modern day six-figure income was well within reach for many a mid-century illustrator.

A six figure income drawing pictures for magazines and advertising... how common is that today? Consider my spot illustration fee of $275 from 1986 which, as a 22 year old kid, made me feel wealthy beyond my wildest dreams. Now calculate it backwards to 1950 dollars and you discover that I was paid the equivalent of $59.38 in Albert Dorne's time. Which really makes me pause and consider "How to lose money in a hurry" ?



Answer: become a professional illustrator in 2011.



* On October 26, from 7 to 9 pm, I'll be in Toronto at The Nook giving a talk about Albert Dorne and many other mid-century illustrators whom I've written about over the last six years. I'll share stories and anecdotes - some from my research but also many from personal interviews I've conducted with many Canadian and American illustrators of the mid-20th century. I'll be looking at changing styles and technology and how both have impacted the business of illustration over the last half century. Perhaps we can learn something from the lessons of the past... or perhaps we are doomed to repeat it.

Also, there will be treats.

If you think you might like to attend, the details are at The Nook Collective website

This week, a preview of some of my discussion subjects.

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Children's Books by Famous Illustrators: Harry Devlin

I've own just one children's book illustrated by Harry Devlin; his 1971 collaboration with wife, Wende, "Cranberry Thanksgiving." Since this weekend is Thanksgiving here in Canada, I thought it would be an ideal time to share this with you.





The atmospheric quality Devlin achieves in his illustrations is really quite stunning.



I'm under the impression this book is still in print, so I won't post too many pages here today...



... but I did want to present enough to demonstrate once more what a skilled picture maker Harry Devlin was.



When I first saw Devlin's character designs for "Cranberry Thanksgiving" I was very much reminded of the characters from Rankin-Bass' 1969 animated cartoon special "Frosty the Snowman."





... but in fact it was Mad magazine artist Paul Coker Jr. who is credited with designing those characters.





Harry and Wende Devlin collaborated on nearly 30 children's books over the later years of their careers - which combined sold in the millions of copies. Here are covers from a few others I found online.







* My Harry Devlin Flickr set.

* Harry and Wende Devlin's official website

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Harry Devlin: From Serious to Zany

During Harry Devlin's ten year association with Collier's magazine, he was often called upon to create editorial cartoons that graced the back page of each weekly issue.





Here once again, Devlin demonstrated his admirable range - from more realistic, serious and illustrative...





... to lighthearted...





... to outright zany.



Devlin generally reserved his most hilarious stylings for those occasions when he was called upon to illustrate Collier's popular "Q&A" series of articles.





Here are a few more for your amusement. In my opinion, they'd have felt just as at home in the pages of Mad magazine as in Collier's.









Harry and Wende Devlin's official website

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Harry Devlin (1918 - 2001)

Here's the earliest piece I've ever found by Harry Devlin.



Its from the 1947 New York Art Directors Annual and clearly demonstrates what an accomplished advertising line art illustrator Devlin was. That ability would have served him extremely well in those days, as line art was very much in use for all sorts of ad art.



Harry Devlin was just as skilled at 'big-foot' cartooning, something that not every commercial artist was capable of.



In fact I've found relatively few who could do both realistic artwork of the sort at the top of this post and cartoon character art as good as you see here.



Even more impressive, Devlin could paint realistic scenes - and did so for major clients like Collier's magazine.



Collier's was one of Devlin's best steady clients. He began working for the magazine in 1947 and credited Collier's with being "where he honed his draftsman and perspective skills."

Its also where he created a wealth of fantastic cartoon and caricature artwork for articles featuring prominent politicians or celebrities of the day.



(These three illustrations below were done for a January 1954 Collier's article called "What Makes Ike Smile" and are typical of much of Devlin's work for that magazine)





In his biography, Devlin writes that "In a touch of irony, [I] was elected President of the National Cartoonists Society in 1956, just as the Golden Age of Illustration was ending. Television quickly replaced print media as the main source of advertising and both Collier's and Saturday Home Magazine folded."

Devlin won many awards from from the NCS, as well as a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators. He also received awards from quite a few other prominent organizations during his long career.

When magazine illustration waned, Harry Devlin and his wife, Wende, combined their skills to write and illustrate 27 children's books.



Among those was "Old Black Witch" and its two sequels which, combined, sold over a million-and-a-half copies.



This week, a look at the work of the talented, versatile Harry Devlin.

* There are extensive biographies of both Harry and Wende Devlin at harryandwendedevlin.com

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