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Frank GodwinAllegory of Defense Industry (figurative male illustration)1919
1919
About the Item
Frank Godwin (1889-1959). Allegory of Defense Industry, 1919. Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. Image measures 20.75 x 26.25 inches. The canvas measures 24 x 36 inches in total. Annotated on top reverse stretcher: Page 1, 13th Issue, August 31, 1919. The publication for which this project was commissioned is still unknown. Godwin's image depicts a young and healthy everyman painted in a naturalistic style. The figure is heroic but unidealized. Unequivocally, he can be identified as an allegorical figure of Industry: in this case, war or defense. A premier example from the Golden Age of illustration, demonstrating distinct influences of the Brandywine School.
The piece is further annotated on reverse canvas: Aug 31. Annotated in white margin areas recto. Upper left: 5472-J, upper right: wanted August 9th, Lower left (indistinct), lower center: 9 3/8. These are all notes to editor and printer.
Condition:
The piece has been professionally conserved under our express guidance. Conservator's report available. The painting has been cleaned and strip lined, restretched upon original stretcher. There are no repaired punctures or tears. Minor paint flaking at upper left ( just below aqua blue sky area) has been stabilized and inpainted.
Surface is entirely flat and stable with no flaking.
There are no other areas of paint loss other than what is evident in white margins. The decision to leave this area intact was made for purposes of authenticity, in the event the piece is acquired by a museum, archive or purist. Of course, a conservator could take the piece to 100% with subsequent inpainting. Alternately, the canvas could be cut down and restretched by a conservator to present the color image only. At present, the choice is yours and at your discretion.
Biography:
Frank Godwin was a prominent painter, magazine illustrator, and advertising artist, who lent his sophisticated talents to the comics for the last 30 years of his life. He contributed to numerous strips in the daily papers. His own creations, "Connie" (1927-1944) and "Rusty Riley" (1948-1959), are among the most highly admired continuity strips in the literature of the comics.
Godwin was the son of an editor for the Washington (D.C.) Star, and began his career in art with his fathers paper at the age of 16. A desire both to perfect his work and broaden his range of opportunity drew him to New York City. There, he studied at the Art Students League. From his late teens he supported himself as a free-lance cartoonist and illustrator. The close companionship and support of the older James Montgomery Flagg, already an established commercial artist, helped him to enter the market. He was soon selling to a large variety of periodicals. His advertising art appeared in virtually all the popular magazines of the time, and he was much sought after to illustrate fiction for such magazines as Colliers, Liberty, and Cosmopolitan.
His illustrations for Winstons popular editions of the classics, in the romantic style of Flagg and Charles Dana Gibson, placed him among the most successful book illustrators of the Twenties and Thirties. He also painted in oils, and his murals for the Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, and the Riverside Yacht Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, are still much admired. He was an active member of the Society of Illustrators for many years, serving for a time as its vice president. He has been elected to its Hall of Fame.
In the early 1920s, Godwin became a staff artist with the Philadelphia Public Ledger, doing covers for the papers Sunday magazine section and illustrating its fiction. His Vignettes of Life, a series of humorous domestic scenes, began in the Ledger in 1924 and was so successful that he was soon in demand for other assignments with the Ledger. He drew Roy Powers, Eagle Scout anonymously for a long time. In 1927, he began his first signed continuity strip, Connie, which debuted on November 13th as a Sunday strip and added dailies on May 13, 1929.
Connie was an exciting, fast-paced adventure strip, liberally laced with humor. It was about one of the new, liberated women, Connie Kurridege, a dauntless lass. In the strips first year, she bested half a dozen villains: an aviatrix, an interior decorator, a secretary, a travel agent, a private detective, and an ace reporter. The resourceful young lady later served a stint as an astronaut in a prolonged science fiction episode. Connie was never carried in many newspapers, however, and folded in 1944.
In 1948, Godwin launched Rusty Riley for King Features, with the dailies written by Rod Reed. It debuted on January 26. The Sundays, written by Godwins brother, Harold, debuted on June 27th. This nostalgic evocation of innocent boyhood, called up a period decades earlier despite the contemporary clothes and automobiles, romanticized its subject in a way already passé; it survived largely because of its handsome art until a few weeks before Godwins death on August 5, 1959.
Godwins elegance of design and meticulous precision of style brought his work to pictorial heights seldom matched in the comics. Never compromising the aesthetic ideals of the illustrator and painter, he employed the same richly textured compositions and painstaking cross-hatching in his comics that he used in book illustrations, giving his work a graphic sophistication that virtually disappeared from the comics with his death.
- Creator:Frank Godwin (1889 - 1959, American)
- Creation Year:1919
- Dimensions:Height: 26.25 in (66.68 cm)Width: 20.75 in (52.71 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Wilton Manors, FL
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU24526403112
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