Pinup Inspiration
For your perfect shoot with Pearl Davies, we'd love to offer you some pinup inspiration to get your imaginations rolling. If you have a !particular custom idea in mind, we're all ears. Click on an artist name to view their profile and pinup art:
Al Buell Al Moore Alberto Vargas Billy De Vorss Bill Medcalf Edward Runci
Fiona Stephenson Gil Elvgren Harry Ekman
Jay Scott Pike Nathalie Rattner Robert Skemp Donald Rust Ted Withers Earl Moran
Art Frahm Edward D'Ancona Baron Von Lind
Enoch Bolles Joyce Ballentyne Rolf Armstrong TN Thompson Vaughn Alden Bass
Bill Randall Freeman Elliot Peter Driben
Al Buell
Alfred Leslie Buell (1910–1996) was an American painter of pin-up art. He was born in Hiawatha, Kansas in 1910, and grew up in Cushing, Oklahoma. He attended some classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, which, in concert with a trip to New York City, decided him on a career in art. In 1935, Buell and his wife moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he joined the Stevens/Hall/Biondi Studio. By 1940, he had opened his own studio. During this period, he did a number of pin-ups for the Gerlach-Barklow calendar company. Buell also did work for several other calendar companies in the early 1940s.
During World War II, Buell was rejected by the draft, so he spent the war painting a variety of popular and patriotic pin-ups for Brown & Bigelow. After the war was over, he began contributing to Esquire's Gallery of Glamour.
Buell returned to Brown & Bigelow in the late 1950s. He continued to paint glamour and pin-ups until about 1965, when he retired from commercial art. He remained active until he was injured in an accident in 1993, after which he remained in a nursing home until his death in 1996.
Buell produced two calendars for Brown & Bigelow Company in 1960 and 1961. His 1960 Calendar was titled "Al Buell's Delectabelles" and 1961 titled "Al Buell's Beauties."
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Al Moore
Moore was a busy illustrator from the 1940s to the late 50s, generating advertising, fashion, story art, and pin-ups. Covers for Saturday Evening Post and Collier's and interior work for these and Woman's Home Companion, American Magazine, Woman's Day, McCall's, Cosmopolitan. Ads for Hertz, Whitman's Chocolates, Ford, Camay, Nash, US Rubber, Coke, Old Gold, Botany. Replaced Vargas and Petty as Esquire's main pin-up man. Moore's girls are less glossy and impossible than those of his talented predecessors, being more girl-next door realistic and natural. He provided calendars for Esquire, Brown and Bigelow. Last illustrations for Pan Am and US Olympics.
Alberto Vargas
Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chávez (9 February 1896 – 30 December 1982) was a noted Peruvian painter of pin-up girls. He is often considered one of the most famous of the pin-up artists. Numerous Vargas paintings have sold and continue to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Born in Arequipa, Peru, he was the son of noted Peruvian photographer Max T. Vargas. Alberto Vargas moved to the United States in 1916 after studying art in Europe, Zurich, and Geneva prior to World War I. While he was in Europe he came upon the French magazine La Vie Parisienne, with a cover by Raphael Kirchner, which he said was a great influence on his work.
His early career in New York included work as an artist for the Ziegfeld Follies and for many Hollywood studios. Ziegfeld hung his painting of Olive Thomas at the theater, and she was thought of as one of the earliest Vargas Girls. Vargas' most famous piece of film work was for the poster of the 1933 film The Sin of Nora Moran, which shows a near-naked Zita Johann in a pose of desperation. The poster is frequently named one of the greatest movie posters ever made.
He became widely noted in the 1940s as the creator of iconic World War-II era pin-ups for Esquire magazine known as "Varga Girls." Between 1940 and 1946 Vargas produced 180 paintings for the magazine. The nose art of many American and Allied World War II aircraft was inspired and adapted from these Esquire pin-ups, as well those of George Petty, and other artists.
In 2004, Hugh Hefner, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Playboy, who had previously worked for Esquire, wrote: "The US Post Office attempted to put Esquire out of business in the 1940s by taking away its second-class mailing permit. The Feds objected, most especially, to the cartoons and the pin-up art of Alberto Vargas. Esquire prevailed in the case that went to the Supreme Court, but the magazine dropped the cartoons just to be on the safe side". A legal dispute with Esquire over the use of the name "Varga" resulted in a judgement against Vargas. He struggled financially until 1959 when Playboy magazine began to use his work. Over the next 16 years he produced 152 paintings for the magazine. His career flourished and he had major exhibitions of his work all over the world.
Vargas' artistic work, paintings and color drawings, were periodically featured in some issues of Playboy magazine in the 1960s and 1970s.
"Memories of Olive" (1920).
The death of his wife Anna Mae in 1974 left him devastated, and he stopped painting. Anna Mae had been his model and business manager, his muse in every way. The publication of his autobiography in 1978 renewed interest in his work and brought him partially out of his self-imposed retirement to do a few works, such as album covers for The Cars (Candy-O, 1979) and Bernadette Peters (Bernardette Peters, 1980; Now Playing, 1981). He died of a stroke on 30 December 1982, at the age of 86. Many of Vargas' works from his period with Esquire are now held by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. It was given those works in 1980 along with a large body of other art from the magazine.
At the December 2003 Christie's auction of Playboy archives, the 1967 Vargas painting Trick or Treat sold for $71,600.
His work was typically a combination of watercolor and airbrush. His mastery of the airbrush is acknowledged by the founding of the Vargas Award, awarded annually by Airbrush Action Magazine, which was named after him. Despite always using figure models, he often portrayed elegantly dressed, semi-nude to nude women of idealized proportions. Vargas' artistic trait would be slender fingers and toes, with nails often painted red.
Vargas is widely regarded as one of the finest artists in his genre. He also served as a judge for the Miss Universe beauty contest from 1956 to 1958.
Notable women painted by Vargas include Olive Thomas, Billie Burke, Nita Naldi, Marilyn Miller, Paulette Goddard, Bernadette Peters, Irish McCalla and Ruth Etting.
Billy De Vorss
Billy De Vorss created lush and vibrant pinups, often inspired by New York's theatres and nightclubs. Billy De Vorss was entirely self-taught and sold his first three published pinups to the Louis F Dow Calendar Company in St Paul c.1933 ... until then he had been working as a teller in a bank in St Joseph, Missouri. There he had met the stunning woman, Glenna, who became his wife and first official model.
Encouraged to develop his talent by Gene Sayles, the manager of Brown & Bigelow's Kansas City branch office, De Vorss soon received his first commission from the company. To celebrate, De Vorss and his wife moved to New York and set up a penthouse studio in the Beaux Arts Building, at Eighteen East Tenth Street. Signing up with the, prestigious American Artists group, De Vorss spent the next several years working for calendar-publishing houses such as Brown & Bigelow, Joseph C. Hoover, and Louis F. Dow. Most of his pastel originals were large and bore his highly distinctive Art Deco inspired signature.
Covers for Beauty Parade and the King Features Syndicate as well as calendar commissions from the Osborne and Goes companies followed in the early 1940s. In 1949, the artist illustrated a highly successful campaign for Botany Woollen's robes with depictions of handsome men lounging at home with their own De Vorss pinups. De Vorss used an incredible variety of pastel colours for his work, and he applied them directly onto the board, blending them dry with his fingers. His occasional oil paintings bear the rich, painterly brushstrokes of the Sundblom School. He displayed a fine sense of composition, a flowing, graceful line, and a daring blend of colours. Like Rolf Armstrong, De Vorss always worked from live models for the final painting. He did, however, employ photographs for preliminary stages.
In 1951, Billy and Glenna De Vorss returned to St. Joseph, their first home. After some time there, they settled in Scottsdale, Arizona, where De Vorss died in 1985. Billy De Vorss biography borrowed from The Great American Pin-Up by Charles G Martignette & Louis K Meisel.
Bill Medcalf
Bill Medcalf painted more than twenty years of beautiful pin-ups for Brown & Bigelow, handling all the special-project calendar commissions for their most important customers.
When Medcalf joined the staff of resident artists at Brown & Bigelow on 18 March 1946, he hoped to get some pointers from his two idols, Gil Elvgren and Norman Rockwell, who were both contributors. When he met both men at a Christmas party that year, he was therefore stunned and flattered when they asked him how he imparted such a finished glow to his work.
For his first assignment in 1947, for Kelly-Springfield Celebrity Tires, Medcalf painted a beautiful girl walking her dog on an estate, with a sports car in the background. Then, for Dorman. Products (auto parts manufacturers), he created a breathtaking picture of a girl and her dog having a picnic in front of an automobile. While still handling these special pin-up projects, Medcalf also went on to deliver one winner after another to a new, more traditional Brown & Bigelow series, The Baseball Hall of Fame.
In 1949, Medcalf did his first pin-up "novelty fold" specialty item for the firm: a booklet that unfolded four times, each time revealing a larger pin-up image, the last being an oversized picture with an advertising message. Named one of the company's top five pin-up artists in their 1951 business Builder, Medcalf released his first pin-up hanger the next year. Entitled Beautiful Morning, this depiction of a young girl just waking up proved to be a best-seller. The versatile Medcalf took on the responsibility for the company's American Boy calendar series in 1953, and he also created many best-selling evening-gown subjects for their glamour line.
In 1940 and 1941, he worked in the art department of the United States Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and in 1942, he joined the Navy as a gunners mate. During his tenure at Brown & Bigelow, Medcalf worked first at the company's headquarters, then out of his home studio in a suburb of St Paul, often using his family and neighbours as models.
Bill Medcalf biography borrowed from The Great American Pin-Up by Charles G Martignette & Louis K Meisel.
Edward Runci
Edward Runci (July 4, 1921-July 1986)
He was a Sicilian-born painter who moved to the United States in the 1930s. Runci's career took off after World War II and he was well known for his paintings of pin-up girls as well as his advertisements for companies such as Coca-Cola. Although most known for his paintings of women, Runci also painted clowns, landscapes and was a portraitist for the Hollywood elite. Runci spent his last decades in Big Bear Lake, CA where he had a studio and art school.
Fiona Stephenson
U.K artist Fiona trained as an illustrator at Barnsley and Harrow School of Art in the mid 80’s. Her early career found her doing TV and magazine illustrations before comic book lettering for Judge Dredd 2000A.D and Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000, this led to colouring work for D.C Comics.
It was at a comic convention in San Diego that she discovered and fell in love with American Pin-Up art, in particular Gil Elvgren, Zoe Mozart and George Petty. After discovering the art of Pin-Up, colouring other people’s artwork didn’t give Fiona the satisfaction it once had so she decided to teach herself to oil paint. After spending a couple of years building up a reputation as an Elvgren tribute painter Fiona then started creating her own vintage styled pin-up girls.
She is now a modern Pin-Up artist in her own right and still takes her inspiration from the artists of 40s/50s advertising. Her paintings are oil on canvas and typically quite large, which is the standard for this cheesecake genre, Fiona likes to work with oil paint because she believes to get the authentic retro feel to the art you have to work in the same way.
Fiona accepts commissions for custom pin-up art. Her art is also available for commercial licensing on your products. Just get in touch and submit your brief.
Fiona’s work provides a nostalgic visit to the glamour and fun of 50s America. She loves the sexy but not sleazy quality to Pin-Up art and aims to make her own paintings playful by creating little stories within the artwork. Fiona hopes the joyful scenes are an antidote to a sometimes cynical world.
Gil Elvgren
Gil Elvgren (March 15, 1914 – February 29, 1980; born Gillette Elvgren) was an American painter of pin-up girls, advertising and illustration. Best known for his pin-up paintings for Brown & Bigelow, Elvgren studied at the American Academy of Art.
He was strongly influenced by the early "pretty girl" illustrators, such as Charles Dana Gibson, Andrew Loomis, and Howard Chandler Christy. Other influences included the Brandywine School founded by Howard Pyle.
Gillette A. Elvgren was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended University High School. After graduation, he began studying art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He subsequently moved to Chicago to study at the American Academy of Art. He graduated from the Academy during the depression at the age of twenty-two. Elvgren joined the stable of artists at Stevens and Gross, Chicago's most prestigious advertising agency. He became a protégé of the talented artist, Haddon Sundblom.
Fresh Lobster.
In 1937, Gil began painting calendar pin-ups for Louis F. Dow, one of America's leading publishing companies, during which time he created about 60 works on 28" x 22" canvas and distinguished them by a printed signature. Many of his pin-ups were reproduced as nose art on military aircraft during World War II. Around 1944, Gil was approached by Brown and Bigelow, a firm that still dominates the field in producing calendars and advertising specialties. He was associated with Brown & Bigelow from 1945 to 1972. At Brown & Bigelow Elvgren began working with 30" x 24" canvases, a format that he would use for the next 30 years, and signed his work in cursive.
Elvgren was a commercial success. He lived in various locations, and was active from the 1930s to 1970s. In 1951 he began painting in a studio in his home, then in Winnetka, Illinois, using an assistant to set up lighting, build props and scenes, photograph sets, and prepare his paints. His clients ranged from Brown and Bigelow and Coca-Cola to General Electric and Sealy Mattress Company. In addition, during the 1940s and 1950s he illustrated stories for a host of magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping. Among the models Elvgren painted were Myrna Hansen, Donna Reed, Barbara Hale, Arlene Dahl, and Kim Novak.
Harry Ekman
Harry Ekman was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1923. He was trained at the American Academy or Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. His early influences were Gil Elvgren, Haddon Sundblom, Joyce Ballantine and others. Ekman initially apprenticed with Sundblom who was a close family friend and for Elvgren. By 1960, Ekman was making a transition from commercial illustration and pin-up art to portraiture. The rest of his career was devoted to gallery works and portraits. He died in Medford, New Jersey in 1999. .1
Jay Scott Pike
Jay Scott Pike (September 6, 1924 – September 13, 2015) was an American comic book artist and commercial illustrator known for his 1950s and 1960s work for Marvel Comics and DC Comics, advertising art, and as a good girl artist. He created the DC character Dolphin and co-created the Marvel character Jann of the Jungle.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 6, 1924, Jay Scott Pike enrolled at the Art Students League in Manhattan, New York City at what he said was age 15 or 16: "I know I was partway into high school. I wasn't a junior or senior yet." After military service in the United States Marines from 1942 to 1946, he went on to study at the Parsons School of Design on GI Bill for one year, then Syracuse University for a semester, and, after his marriage in 1948, the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, for a year-and-a-half. Afterward, he and his wife moved to northern New Jersey. After meeting comic-book artist, Al Hartley, "I went into drawing comics with Al, but we just didn't get along, so by the time we decided to split I'd gotten to know [editor] Stan Lee" at Marvel Comics' 1950s precursor, Atlas Comics, "and Stan said that he would give me work of my own."
His earliest confirmed comic book art is the five-page story "The Living Dead", by an unknown writer, in Adventures into Terror #3 (April 1951), from Atlas Comics, the 1950s forerunner of Marvel Comics. Tentative earlier credits exist, but because it was not standard practice during this period to list complete writer/artist comic-book credits, confirmation is difficult. The interior art to "Captain Chaos" in the November 1952 issue of the magazine "Planet Stories" is credited to "J.S. Pike".
Nathalie Rattner
With illustrations appearing in media from the upcoming Australian feature film Ruby’s Balloon and its companion short A Nightmare in Chalk to creating an illustration for NBC’s The Playboy Club, Nathalie is fast becoming one of today’s most sought after illustrators. Internationally known for her pin-up work, Nathalie's work has captured the eye of a diverse audience, including Playboy Playmate of the Year Claire Sinclair, Face Off host Mckenzie Westmore and actress/singer Renee Olstead, with whom she has collaborated on a variety of projects in recent years.
With her highly versatile skill set, Nathalie is able to move fluidly between a wide array of styles and subject matter. She has designed cereal box covers, coloring books, vintage style paper dolls, book covers and fabric designs for fashion brands. Over the last few years, she has partnered with UK-based Bond & Knight, who won the 2015 BTAA Fashion Accessory of the Year award, to create a line of bespoke men’s leather wallets for worldwide distribution.
Robert Skemp
Robert Oliver Skemp was born in 1910 the son of Olive Hess Skemp, a prominent rug designer and artist, and grew up with a love of the sea and the ships that sailed it. A librarian aunt provided books with stories like Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues under the sea, and Mysterious Island with illustrations by artists like N.C. Wyeth, Meade Schaeffer and others.
At age 16 he enrolled in the Arts Student's League of New York to study with Thomas Hart Benton, George Bridgeman, and Frank V. DuMond. Still a young man, he joined the merchant marines and went around the world on a cargo ship, traveling to Europe and the Middle East.
Donald Rust
D.L. "Rusty" Rust was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. He began drawing and painting at a very early age and has never had the desire to be anything but a serious artist. His early work was directly influenced by his grandfather, Emil Rust, Gil Elvgren, Bob Toombs, and Norman Rockwell. However, he feels there has been no one single influence in his wildlife art and insists that all wildlife artists have affected his style.
For many years, Rusty's paintings concentrated on circus and portrait subjects; but recently, wildlife subjects have intrigued him more and more. His portraits include such prominent individuals as: Emmett Kelly Sr., Emmett Kelly Jr., Merle Evans (Ringling band leader), Norman Rockwell, and Molly Rockwell. In fact, D.L. Rust and Norman Rockwell used to correspond regularly and in one letter Rockwell emphasized that Rusty's artwork "is very good indeed."
Rust's paintings hang in the Ringling Museum of the Circus, Sarasota, Florida; the Norman Rockwell Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
He has illustrated books for Valkyrie Press, A.S. Barnes & Co., and World of Yesterday Publications; and has provided illustrations for Reader's Digest and other magazines. His artwork has also appeared on collector's plates, appointment books, wall calendars, porcelain mugs, playing cards and jigsaw puzzles.
Rusty's ability to capture nature lies between fantasy and reality. Realism is his style, but he wants to take the collector's imagination one step further. He is an artist sensitive to nature and its surroundings. The beauty of his artistic documentation is distinctly his own. Rusty takes us not just to a creative visual, but to a place and a story.
Rusty has produced and sold over 17,000 paintings and has 2,000 originals registered by owners with the National Museum and Gallery Registration Association (an NMGRA record!).
Specifics
Artist medium: Oil on canvas
Subjects: Wildlife, scenics, seascapes, still-life, portraits, glamour, illustrations, pin-ups, camouflage-type, fantasy, nudes
Book illustration: Valkyrie Press, Inc., A. S. Barnes & Co., World of Yesterday Publications, Reader's Digest, Wildlife Art News, Florida Wildlife, Business, Splash, Tease!, Windsor Pub., North Light Books, The Press
Portraits of Prominent Persons: Emmett Kelly, Sr., Emmett Kelly, Jr., Merle Evans, Lou Jacobs, Charly Baumann, Norman Rockwell, Molly Rockwell, Irish McCalla, Mamie Van Doren
Work in Museums: Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Ringling Museum of the Circus, Norman Rockwell Museum
Limited-edition prints & posters published by: Contemplative Investments, Galaxy Art, Fireside Classics, Voyageur Art, Black Wolf Press, Inc., Canyon Publishing, Applejack Limited Editions
Calendars: Shaw-Barton, Daydream Publishing, Brown & Bigelow, Avalanche, Golden Turtle Press
Products
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Flambro: Porcelain mugs, collector's plates, shopping bags, tee-shirts, candy boxes, porcelain figurine
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The Bradford Exchange: Collector's plates, greeting cards
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Hoyle Products: Playing cards, jigsaw puzzles
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F.X. Schmid: Jigsaw puzzles
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Prince Island Apparel: Tee-shirts
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Leanin' Tree, Vantage, Sunrise, Canadian Greetings: Greeting cards
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21st Century: Trading cards
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Miscellaneous
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First with limited-edition original paintings (clowns, wildlife, Norman Rockwell portrait)
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Over 2,000 paintings registered with the National Museum and Gallery Registration Association (an NMGRA record!)
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"Very Good Indeed": Norman Rockwell (27, July 1976)
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Hobbies: Nature and wildlife observation
Ted Withers
Edward Withers was born in Wellington, New Zealand. After studying at Wellington College, he enrolled at the Royal Academy in London and later at the South Kensington School of Art and the Slade School of Art. Eager for more training, Withers moved to Paris and the prestigious Académie Julian, During World War One, he saw service in Samoa, Egypt, France, and Germany and received three decorations.
In 1924, Withers came to America with his wife and two children. In his Hollywood years, he did a number of celebrity portraits while employed in a series of jobs, including art director at MGM Studios, supervisor in the trick and miniature department at Universal Studios, art director for Earnshaw-Young Advertising Agency, and art director for the Sterling Press Lithograph Company. He also painted fine-art works for his own enjoyment, and his award-winning landscapes were widely exhibited.
In November 1950, at his first Brown & Bigelow cocktail party, Withers was talking with Norman Rockwell when Rolf Armstrong and Gil Elvgren arrived. These two pin-up greats were introduced to Withers, who was bowled over when Armstrong praised him as "one of America's greatest, most versatile painters" and Elvgren, who had a keen interest in photography, added "one of the best photographers in the country".
In a letter to Brown & Bigelow, he once described the view from his Hollywood apartment in this way: "At night I look out on a carpet of jewels composed of neon and street lights, and here I work and am grateful that way over the eastern horizon, you nice people multiply my effort and enable me to live very well indeed".
Ted Withers biography borrowed from The Great American Pin-Up by Charles G Martignette & Louis K Meisel.
Earl Moran
Earl Steffa Moran (December 8, 1893 – January 17, 1984), born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, was a 20th Century pin-up and glamour artist. Moran's first instruction in art came under the direction of John Stich, an elderly German artist who also taught the great illustrator W.H.D. Koerner. Moran also studied with Walter Biggs at the Chicago Art Institute.
Moran later studied at the famed Art Students League in Manhattan, where he took instruction from the muralists Vincent Drumond, Robert Henri, Thomas Fogarty (Norman Rockwell's teacher), and the legendary anatomist George Bridgman. After moving back to Chicago in 1931 and opening a small studio where he specialized in photography and illustration, he sent some paintings of bikini-clad girls to two calendar companies; when both Brown and Bigelow and Thomas D. Murphy Company bought the work, his career was officially launched.
Moran signed an exclusive contract with Brown and Bigelow in 1932 and by 1937, his pinups had sold millions of calendars for the company. In 1940, Life ran a feature article entitled "Speaking of Pictures" which mostly focused on Moran's work and made him a national celebrity. In 1941, Moran helped the magazine publisher, Robert Harrison, to launch a new men's magazine called Beauty Parade, and he later contributed pin-ups to other Harrison magazines such as Flirt, Wink and Giggles.
In 1946, Moran moved to Hollywood though he had already painted many movie stars including Betty Grable, for publicity posters. Soon after his arrival, he interviewed a young starlet named Norma Jean Dougherty who wanted to model for him. For the next four years, Marilyn Monroe posed for Moran and the two became friends. She always credited him with making her legs look better than they were as she felt they were too thin. Moran's work during this time period is now his most valuable; a Moran Marilyn pastel sold for $83,650, nearly doubling the previous record for one of his works, when the Craig MacMillan collection was sold at Heritage Auctions in February 2011.
Moran lived in the San Fernando Valley from 1951 to 1955, hosting fabulous parties, directing and starring in short television films, painting portraits of Earl Carroll's Vanities Girls, and maintaining his position as a star of the pin-up world.
After a move to Las Vegas (circa 1955) and several years of living in the fast lane, Moran decided to devote his time to painting fine-art subjects, with nudes as his favorite theme. Signing with Aaron Brothers Galleries, he painted for collectors until 1982, when his eyesight failed. An interesting note, some of his earlier works for Harrison were signed "Steffa" or "Black Smith"
Moran died in Santa Monica, CA on January 17, 1984
Art Frahm
Art Frahm (1907–1981) was an American painter of campy pin-up girls and advertising. Frahm lived in Chicago, and was active from the 1940s to 1960s. He was commercially successful.
Frahm had adequate technical competence for his medium, with a style somewhat reminiscent of Norman Rockwell's, though more cartoony. He was mostly influenced by commercial artist Haddon Sundblom, with whom Frahm may have worked as an assistant early in his career. Frahm’s forte was depicting beautiful young white women, taking in rendering their legs and figures. Frahm’s depictions of the women's faces are less successful, often tending towards plastic doll-like expressions. Minor problems with perspective and unrealistic depiction of subsidiary figures and objects are common in Frahm’s work. Some of his artistic touches were deliberately unrealistic and artistically daring—for instance, his coloring of a city street lemon-yellow in an otherwise realist painting.
Today, Frahm is best known for his "ladies in distress" pictures involving beautiful young women whose panties mysteriously fall to the ground in a variety of public situations, causing maximum embarrassment to his pin-up girls and often causing them to spill their bag of groceries. In one of Frahm’s noted idiosyncratic touches, celery is often depicted. The falling-panties art has a small cult following as mid-20th century kitsch, or even as fetish art. The works have been described with irony by James Lileks and Frahm's art works are available on the Internet. The falling-panties paintings were imitated by other pin-up artists, such as Jay Scott Pike and Al Brulé.
In addition to pin-ups, Frahm created a series of humorous hobo-themed calendar illustrations. Another set of paintings celebrated traffic safety, complete with smiling, chubby crossing guards and schoolchildren (one such painting appears as a calendar print in the background of a bar scene in the movie Hud). His advertising art included works for Coca-Cola and Coppertone
Edward D'Ancona
Baron Von Lind
Jerry Lind (born October 31, 1937) in Duluth, Minnesota is also known as Baron von Lind. He is the son of Baron Johann von Lind. After he left the United States military in 1989, Lind assumed his ancestral name of "von Lind". Von Lind began his artistic career as a young apprentice in a publishing firm doing graphic art. In later years, he would work in the fields of art direction, magazine art illustration, portrait painter, pinup artist for calendars and classical painting. von Lind also worked at Paramount Studios where he painted such stars as Yul Brynner, Sophia Loren, Peter O'Toole and Clint Eastwood to name a few.
In 1982, he was approached by the White House to do a painting of then President Ronald Reagan. The painting now hangs in the Reagan Museum in Simi Valley, California. Museums that display his works include the Proctor Historical Society, and the 15th Air Force Museum in Riverside, California. His painting titled 'Mission 207' was dedicated on May 14, 2004 at March Air Force Base. and is now permanently displayed as part of the museum’s history honoring the men and aircraft of the World War II era.
Enoch Bolles
Joyce Ballentyne
Rolf Armstrong
T N Thompson
Vaughn Alden Bass
Vaughan Alden Bass was an American painter of pin-up art.
Bass was a Chicago artist who started his career working for the Louis F. Dow Company in St. Paul during the mid-1930s. Bass created his own pin-ups for Brown & Bigelow, but he worked for Dow as a "paint over" artist, redoing work that other artists (notably Gil Elvgren) had done for the company.
Bass' style was often compared with that of Elvgren, Al Buell, and Joyce Ballantyne. In the late 1950s, Bass did a series of wrestling scenes that demonstrated his comfort with any subject matter. He created the Wonder Bread Girl in the 1950s; the Wonder Bread girl, is modeled after his own daughter. His portrait of President Dwight D. Eisenhower is in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C
Bill Randall
Freeman Elliot
Born in 1922 in a suburb of Chicago, Elliot apprenticed at the Stevens/Gross studio, where he had the opportunity to learn from Gil Elvgren, Joyce Ballantyne, Al Buell, and Haddon Sundblom. Shortly after serving in the Navy in World War ll, he was commissioned by Brown & Bigelow to create two sets of double card decks: Winning Aces and Hit the Deck became runaway best-sellers. In 1953, Elliot's work appeared on Brown & Bigelow's successful Ballyhoo Calendar, along with that of Esquire artists Al Moore, Ernest Chiriaka, Eddie Chan, and Ward Brackett.
Millions of Americans saw his pinups on the covers of Hearst's Pictorial Weekly during the 1950s.
Though often amusing, his pinups could also be sexy and sensual. Elliot, who was represented by Stevens/Gross, had a cross-over career that encompassed front covers for national magazines, story illustrations, and advertising art.
Freeman Elliot biography borrowed from The Great American Pin-Up by Charles G Martignette & Louis K Meisel.
Peter Driben
Peter Driben (October 22, 1903 - September, 1968), an American pin-up artist, was perhaps one of the most productive pin-up artists of the 1940s and 1950s. Although both Alberto Vargas and Gil Elvgren have extensive catalogues of work, neither came close to the output of Driben. Driben's pinups delighted the American public from the beginning of World War II until the great baby boom of the 1950s.
Born in Boston, Driben studied at Vesper George Art School before moving to Paris (circa 1925). While taking classes at the Sorbonne in 1925, he began a series of highly popular pen-and-ink drawings of the city's showgirls. His first known pin-up was the cover to Tattle Tales in October 1934, and by 1935 he was producing covers for Snappy, Pep, New York Nights, French Night Life and Caprice. Driben's popularity continued to rise in the late thirties with covers for Silk Stocking Stories, Gay Book, Movie Merry-Go-Round and Real Screen Fun.
Driben's career expanded into advertising with his move to New York in late 1936. He created original three-dimensional die-cut window displays for Philco Radios, Cannon Bath Towels, and the Weber Baking Company. Perhaps his most famous work being the original posters and publicity artwork for The Maltese Falcon. Peter Driben was also a close friend of publisher Robert Harrison, and in 1941 was contracted to produce covers for Harrison's new magazine Beauty Parade. Driben went on to paint hundreds of covers for that publication and for the other seven titles Harrison was to launch - Flirt, Whisper, Titter, Wink, Eyeful, Giggles, and Joker. Driben would often have as many as six or seven of his covers being published every month. Driben's work for Harrison established him as one of America's most recognized and successful pin-up and glamour artists. Just before he began to work for Harrison, Driben married the artist, actress and poet, Louise Kirby.
In 1944 he was offered the unusual opportunity, for a pin-up artist, of becoming the art director of the New York Sun, a post he retained until 1946. During the war, his popular painting of American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima sparked a considerable amount of media attention.
In 1956, Driben and Louise moved to Miami Beach, where he spent his retirement years painting portraits (including one of Dwight D. Eisenhower) and other fine-art works, which were organized into successful exhibitions by his wife. Driben died in 1968, Louise in 1984.
Pearl Davies Vintage Pinup and Boudoir Photography Newcastle Australia
Vintage Pinup & Boudoir Photography
Atomic Hideaway: A Retro Revival themed short stay accommodation
Newcastle New South Wales Australia
