Haddon Sundblom

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Playboy magazine December 1972 cover featuring the last illustration work of Haddon Sundblom
Playboy magazine December 1972 cover featuring the last illustration work of Haddon Sundblom

Haddon Hubbard "Sunny" Sundblom (June 22, 1899 – March 10, 1976) was a United States artist best known for the images of Santa Claus he created for The Coca-Cola Company.

Sundblom was born in Muskegon, Michigan to a Finnish-Swedish-speaking family. His father, Karl Wilhelm Sundblom, came from the farm Norrgårds in the village of Sonboda in Föglö of the Swedish-speaking Åland Islands, then part of the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland now Finland, and his mother Karin Andersson was from Sweden. Sundblom studied at the American Academy of Art.

Sundblom is best remembered for his advertising work, specifically the Santa Claus advertisements he painted for The Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. Sundblom's Claus firmly established the larger-than-life, grandfatherly Claus as a key figure in Christmas imagery. So popular were Sundblom's images of Claus (Sundblom's images are used by Coca-Cola to this day) that the urban legend soon arose that Sundblom had actually created the modern image of Santa Claus.1 Sundblom also painted the iconic image of the Quaker Oats man in 1957; the image is still used in Quaker branding to this day.

In addition to his illustration work, Sundblom is recognized as a major influence on many well known pin-up artists, such as Gil Elvgren, Joyce Ballantyne, and Art Frahm. In the mid-1930s, he began to paint pin-ups and glamour pieces for calendars. Sundblom's last assignment, in 1972, was a cover painting for Playboy's Christmas issue.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. See "The Claus That Refreshes". Article from Snopes.com — Urban Legends Reference Pages.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  • Dream of Santa: Haddon Sundblom's Advertising Paintings for Christmas, 1931–1964, by Haddon Sundblom, Barbara Fahs Charles, J. R. Taylor
  • The Great American Pin-Up, by Charles G. Martignette and Louis K. Meisel, ISBN 3-8228-1701-5
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