John Ruge - 1

John Ruge's illustrations of women were more restrained. Ruge was also published in Collier's in the 1940s and 1950s. This illustration is from a story in This Week a Sunday supplement that had the largest circulation in the world. It ran good fiction and used top illustrators. The production was gravure, which allowed for better reproduction than the letterpress of the time.

Ruge also illustrated fiction by Westbrook Pegler in Sunday supplements published by Hearst newspapers, as shown here. Click on images to enlarge them. The production is pretty bad, letterpress on cheap newsprint.

More from This Week, with better reproduction.

This is a portion of a consumer magazine ad for Pitney Bowes, manufacturer of postage machines.

Comments

[Larry]

Jack was one of my drawing teacher at Parsons School of Design in the late seventies early eighties. He was an excellent draftsman and genuinely nice guy. He always came prepared for class with a whole portfolio of drawings, both anatomical and artistic as well as gags he'd worked on. He'd arive early to class (I think punctuality was important to him based on the number of watches he wore, one or two on each wrist) pin his drawings on the wall and we would talk about them during the model breaks. He had a very respectful way of teaching. He would walk around the class with tracing paper and if he saw an issue he wanted to address he would never draw on your drawing. I loved to watch the master dratsman know just what line was out of place and confidently demonstrate with tracing paper where your drawing had veered off coarse....and if you did a good drawing, he couldn't contain his enthusiasm, "Wow! thats a bute!"...Thanks for bringing back the memory of a great artist and wonderful teacher, Jack Ruge.

[Leif Peng]

Thanks for posting these Ruge pieces, Paul! I'm especially excited to see his story illustrations ( I've only ever come across one - in an old "Adventure" magazine ). Thanks for sharing. L ;-)

[Sonal Panse]

Beautiful Work! Thanks so much for this blog. It's very informative and inspiring.

Sonal