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Illustrating for
Reader's Digest
I Paint Portraits and Historical Subjects
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Oliver
Wendell Holmes
I painted a dozen pictures
illustrating the life of the great Justice of the Supreme Court. |
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1965, still living in Minneapolis, I printed a small brochure of my
work, in black and white. I ordered 500 copies from the printer, but
when I began to mail them out, my mailing never went beyond a dozen
copies. I sent the brochures to the art editor at Reader's Digest,
National Geographic magazine, and other well-known periodicals
on the East Coast. After the first dozen were in the mail, I couldn't
think of anyone else to mail to.
To my astonishment, a few days after the brochures went into the mail,
the phone rang in my studio. The voice on the phone was that of the
most famous art director in America, Kenneth Stuart of the Reader's
Digest — calling from New York. Kenneth Stuart had been,
for decades, the art director of the Saturday Evening Post
— the man who had commissioned all those marvelous cover paintings
from the great Norman Rockwell.
Mr. Stuart had on his desk the manuscript for a novel with a religious
theme. The book was Christy, by Catherine Marshall. It seems
that every illustrator that Mr. Stuart had called was busy and had
turned down the assignment. As Mr. Stuart sat frustrated at his desk,
my brochure, with many paintings of a religious nature, arrived in
the morning mail. And now the great art director was asking me to
paint a dozen pictures for the Digest's condensed edition of Christy.
When this book was completed, I was assigned a Life of Oliver Wendell
Holmes, then the biography of Sir William Osler, the great physician
who helped to found Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
These jobs were followed by illustrations for the magazine itself
— mostly portraits. I painted Walt Disney, Mother Teresa, King
Hussein of Jordan, Bob Hope, Vice President Spiro Agnew, Mrs. Richard
Nixon, and on and on. My relationship with the Digest lasted for six
years, and was the motivating factor in my move from Minneapolis to
New York.
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Colonial
Christmas
This painting was used on
the personal Christmas card of Lila and DeWitt Wallace, founders
of the Reader's Digest. Mrs. Wallace sent me a check for $7,000
— the most money I had ever received for a painting. |
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Dr. Osler in the Almshouse
One of my first
assignments for Reader's Digest was a series of paintings illustrating
the life of Sir William Osler. Dr. Osler was a prominent nineteenth-century
physician, and a founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
in Baltimore. |
Lieutenant Holmes at
the Battle of Edwards Ferry
One of the paintings
for the life of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The reproductions on
these pages are made from tearsheets of the printed book, rather
than from the original paintings, which no longer exist. |
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"adventures"
contents