Joann Rea

Enchanted Garden

Delos Palmer Jr. Tree in Winter Signed lower left Oil on Masonite 10 x 8 inches Delos Palmer, Jr. was born January 26, 1890 in New York City. His father was Dr. Delos Palmer, a socially prominent Park Avenue dentist. His mother was Jennifer Emma Banta. His parents were both born in NYC, where they married in 1880 and had five children. There had three sons and two daughters. He was the fourth born. They lived in a private townhouse at 48 West 50th Street, with a cook, a waitress, and a nurse to assist in his father's dental practice on the ground floor. They lived a privileged life and the children all went to the best private schools. He graduated high school in June of 1908. He studied at The Art Students League from 1911 to 1915 with the renowned American Impressionist, George Bellows. According to the artist, "Bellows was a good influence on me. He taught me how to paint what I see and what I feel!" In 1916 Palmer moved to the historic Holbein Studios at 139 West 55th Street. He worked there until 1920, when he moved to the more fashionable Greenwich Village, where he became a successful society portraitist. He was 27 years old during the Great War, so he was not selected for military service. In 1923 Palmer began to sell interior story illustrations to Metropolitan Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and Liberty. In 1924 he married Helen Smith Romme and moved to Stamford, CT, where they raised a daughter and two step-sons. The fateful market crash of 1929 ended Palmer's high society portrait business, but he soon found work through his contacts at Liberty magazine's MacFadden Publishing, which also produced several crime and detective magazines such as Master Detective and True Detective. He then began to paint pulp covers for Dime Mystery, Clues, Frontier Stories, Action Stories, Western Trails, All Star Adventure, Complete Western Book...

Only an artist (or a stockholder) could see the beauty in a cobbled-together industrial complex. Rendered by artist N. Robins in muted golds and greens, a typical hodgepodge of struc...