Covers of the Saturday Evening Post

Résumé du livre

Here are more than 3,500 covers from the golden age of American illustration: J. C. Leyendecker's popular holiday covers, including the perennial New Year's baby; evocations of the great outdoors, particularly the American West, by N. C. Wyeth, Oliver Kemp, E. F. Wittmack, and Paul Bransom; portraits of beautiful women by talents as diverse as Harrison Fisher, W. Haskell Coffin, Neysa McMein, Penrhyn Stanlaws, Philip Boileau, and Clarence Underwood. Here also are Norman Rockwell's numerous beloved images: the barbershop quartet rehearsing - where else? - at the barbershop; the disheveled, proudly beaming schoolgirl with a black eye outside the principal's office; the small boy who's just discovered a Santa Claus costume in a bureau drawer; Rockwell's series portraits: days in the lives of a small boy and a small girl, as well as the sequence called "Gossip", and his portraits of presidential candidates and, later, other celebrities. Jan Cohn, who has written extensively about the Saturday Evening Post, illuminates the covers in a cogent and entertaining text. While tracing the evolution of the magazine, Ms. Cohn singles out the best-loved and the most important covers, discussing the illustrators' styles and influences, and placing each image in its proper historical context. It is interesting to watch the twentieth century unfold: World War I gives way to bobbed flappers in the twenties; the thirties bow under the Great Depression, followed by World War II; the end of the war leads to the family-centered, leisure-oriented fifties, yielding to the turbulent sixties.