Mead Schaeffer

“For A Discriminating Clientele: Duncan Phyfe” Packard Motor Car Company Ad

1930

Illustration for “Women America Remembers: Peggy O’Neil” by Arthur D. Howden Smith for The Red Book Magazine, published March 1930, illustrated pages 20-21. This painting by Mead Schaeffer depicts a romantic encounter between Peggy O'Neil and her first husband, John Timberlake. The accompanying caption reads: "It was inevitable that Peggy should fall in love—and she did, with John Timberlake, who had little besides his face to recommend him." It was created in 1930 for the third installment of The Red Book Magazine’s “Women America Remembers” series, which features stories of women famous for “personality, beauty, wit or audacity, or because of the tragedy left in their train.” Margaret ("Peggy") O'Neil Eaton remains a figure of historical intrigue, primarily for her central role in the "Petticoat Affair," a significant political scandal during Andrew Jackson's presidency. The circumstances surrounding Peggy’s marriage to John Eaton, occurring shortly after the death of her first husband, John Timberlake, and her family’s background as tavern-keepers, coupled with her perceived impudent personality, subjected her to intense social scrutiny in Washington D.C. Upon John Eaton's appointment as Secretary of War, Peggy faced social ostracism led by Floride Calhoun, wife of Vice President John Calhoun...

Medium: Oil on Canvas Signature: Signed Upper Left Image of two men, one seated and one standing. From the book Head Tide by Joseph C. Lincoln

A somewhat similar Cornwell featuring a strong woman at the center of a the composition just sold at Christie's for $164,000. In this work we also see a strong woman at the center of the composition. Here she surrounded by men. More than 20 beautifully rendered post-impressionist portraits in character, define Dean Cornwell as one of America's great artists. In his time, he was a famous as Norman Rockwell and was Norman Rockwell's favorite illustrator. "One thing puzzled Dirty Dan extremely. That was the perfectly frank, friendly manner in which his employer and this outcast woman greeted each other, the earnestness with which they conversed, and the effect of the woman's low-spoken words upon the color of Hector McKaye's face." Morris Weiss collection...

Irving Ramsay Wiles, 1861-1948 A Fashionable Young Lady Oil on canvas 28 1/8 x 22 5/8 inches Signed lower right: Irving R Wiles Illustrator, teacher, and painter Irving Ramsey Wiles was adept at portraits, figural works, and landscapes characterized by the informal elegance of cosmopolitan American art at the turn of the twentieth century. Wiles received his earliest art instruction from his father, landscape painter and teacher Lemuel M. Wiles (1826–1905), and at the age of eighteen, in 1879, exhibited his first painting at New York’s prestigious National Academy of Design. After one year’s study at the Art Students League in New York, under the influential painter-teachers William Merritt Chase and J. Carroll Beckwith, Wiles went to Paris for further study. He enrolled in the Académie Julian, a popular school among American artists, and then worked in the studio of French academic painter Charles Auguste Émile Durand, known as Carolus-Duran (1837–1917). During his student years Wiles painted watercolor street scenes of Paris, and he also traveled in Italy and in the French countryside. Wiles returned to New York in 1884 and exhibited two of his sketches. These attracted the notice of the art editor of the popular Century Magazine, who asked the young artist to make illustrations for the journal. Wiles’s illustrations appeared in other publications as well, and he also supported himself by teaching at his studio and at his father’s summer art school in upstate New York. Wiles was elected a member of the progressive Society of American Artists and, after one of his works won a prize there, to the National Academy of Design as an associate member; full membership followed in 1897. By that date, Wiles was able to devote himself more fully to portraits and figural compositions in oils, paintings that mark the influence of his teacher Chase, who remained a lifelong friend. Like his mentor, Wiles also worked in watercolor and pastel and belonged to several organizations devoted to those media, which enjoyed revivals in late-nineteenth-century America. He exhibited his work widely and won numerous awards throughout his career. In the late 1890s, Wiles and his father moved their summer classes to Peconic, on the North Fork of New York’s Long Island...