100 Years of Illustration :

James Montgomery Flagg photographed in 1915 by famous photographer Arnold Genthe (1869-1942).

You've seen this illustration a million times. Flagg, who began his career as a child prodigy, grew and groomed himself into a handsome young man with rakish good looks and a fondness for beautiful women. When the government wanted artists to contribute their skills to propaganda posters, Flagg posed himself in front of a mirror and immortalized himself forever. Four million were printed, beginning in 1917 and the same image was used all over again in World War II to encourage enlistments.

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This recruitment poster of 1914 portraying Lord Kitchener by British illustrator Alfred Leete (1882-1933) predated Flagg's poster. It had first appeared in the same year on the cover of London Opinion, a weekly magazine.

I've included some of Flagg's more pedestrian stuff in an earlier post entitled Charles Dana Gibson and His Imitators.

From the December 1906 issue of Scribner's Monthly Magazine.

I had no idea that Flagg was so great a painter. I had heard from my mentor Harold Irving Smith about Flagg's flamboyant behavior and his great theatre friends the Barrymores, but I hadn't seen his fantastic easel work until I bought a copy of Susan E. Meyer's excellent America's Great Illustrators, copyright in 1978 by Harry N. Abrams, New York.

John French Sloan, born 2 August 1871, was a prominent member of the so-called Ashcan School (a name he hated) of U.S. painters and a member of The Eight, which included Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, George Luks and William Glackens.My mentor Harold Irving Smith studied with Henri at the old Art Students League in New York City and personally knew many of these giants. Sloan was a slow and ponderous workman, according the accounts of his peers, so did not have success in doing reportage for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked with Glackens. Both men developed great concern for the city poor and spent their lives in social protest. John Sloan died on 8 September 1951 in the month following his 80th birthday.

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