John Alan Maxwell

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John Alan Maxwell (March 7, 1904-April 13, 1984) was an American artist known primarily for his book and magazine illustrations, as well as historical paintings. He also was an illustrator for many commercial publications, including Collier's Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, The Golden Book Magazine, The American Magazine, and Woman's Home Companion.

Contents

[edit] Early years and education

Maxwell was born in Roanoke, Virginia[1] and raised in Johnson City, Tennessee, at 430 West Locust Street, the son of Arthur Clifford Maxwell and Bessie Mae (Ball) Maxwell. He was the oldest of five children, including Elizabeth Victoria Maxwell (Smedberg), Clifford Arthur Maxwell, Gladys Virginia Maxwell (McDaniel), and Julia Reeve Maxwell (Croasdell).

Maxwell worked as a soda jerk in a drug store while attending Science Hill High School in Johnson City. At 16, he enrolled at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, District of Columbia. He continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York, where he studied under painter George Luks[2], a member of the Ashcan School of early twentieth-century American artists who often painted pictures of New York city life. One of his other teachers was noted book and magazine illustrator Frank Vincent Dumond[3], whose students also included Georgia O’Keefe and Norman Rockwell[4].

[edit] Artistic career

By 1925, at the age of 21, Maxwell was illustrating for Collier’s and Golden Book magazines and had established a studio at the famous Tenth Street Studio. The building[5], designed by Richard Morris Hunt, was erected and opened in 1858 by James Boorman Johnston (1822-1887), whose brother, John Taylor Johnston, became the first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years later. The Tenth Street Studio at 51 West Tenth Street in New York was home to “artist entrepreneurs” for 98 years—artists from the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists—including such famous artists as Frederick E. Church, Albert Bierstadt, Winslow Homer, Sanford R. Gifford, John La Farge and William Merritt Chase. The previous occupant of Maxwell’s studio was the Lebanese artist, poet, and writer Kahlil Gibran[6].

By the early 1930s, Maxwell was illustrating for such noted writers as Christopher Morley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Pearl S. Buck[7] and Edna Ferber. In 1936, according to his 1984 obituary in the Johnson City Press Chronicle, he won first place in the Society of Illustrators competition in New York--and was named one of the top 10 illustrators in the country[8]. A prolific illustrator, other authors for whom he illustrated include John Steinbeck, Joseph Conrad, F. Van Wyck Mason, Allen Eckert, Frank Yerby, James Street, Booth Tarkington, Frank Slaughter, and Thomas Costain. He maintained his studio at the Tenth Street Studio until it was demolished in 1956. Maxwell returned to Johnson City shortly thereafter, and continued to work at his studio at 428 West Locust Street until his death in 1984.

He is also credited by a vendor on eBay with an illustration for Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was used for the Broadway play. The vendor states that they sold the painting. (citation needed.)


Maxwell illustrated this short story for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Golden Book Magazine in December, 1930

Maxwell illustrated the portrait of Pearl S. Buck's father on the cover of "Fighting Angel" in 1936. Maxwell also illustrated the portrait of Buck's mother on the cover of "The Exile" in 1935. Buck won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938.

Maxwell illustrated John Steinbeck's "The Pearl of the World" in this December, 1945 issue of Woman's Home Companion Magazine.

[edit] Significance

John Alan Maxwell was described in a 1947 profile in American Artist magazine as the quintessential "illustrator of romance."

Artistic significance is largely subjective. However, Maxwell illustrated multiple books and magazine serials for Pearl S. Buck for over a decade, including the portrait of the author’s mother for the cover of the 1935 book, The Exile, and the companion portrait of her father for the cover of her 1936 book, Fighting Angel in addition to his illustrations of the serialized editions of these two books in Woman's Home Companion from 1935-1937. Mrs. Buck was the first American woman to be awarded both the Pulitzer Prize (1932) and Nobel Prize (1938) for literature, and these book illustrations are encased along with Buck's Nobel Prize in a glass case at the Green Hills Farm in Perkasie, Pennsylvania.

In a profile of Maxwell in the February, 1948 issue of Esquire Magazine[9], writer Robert U. Godsoe described the artist (5 excerpted paragraphs below):

"Here is a romantic painter of dangerously exciting women--women with 'great mystery in their hair and moisture on their hands.'"


"John Alan Maxwell, one of today's brightest lights in the illustrating field, yearns for times past, places forgotten, a world most imaginary, popularly supposed to have been pre-Civil War Dixie. The urge is a charming, if sometimes macabre nostalgia."


"That Maxwell should spend his efforts upon a romanticized, literary past is no less legitimate than the preoccupation of a Chirico with long sad vistas in towns that never were. Maxwell is entitled to his moon-drenched graveyards as Poe was to his misty mid-regions. The only question we are permitted to ask is, "How far can nostalgia go without becoming the mutterings of an old man in his beer (or his bourbon) who likes to tell you, ad infinitum, about things that have ceased to interest anyone but himself, and himself only because he has nothing better to do?" What we are attempting to say to John Maxwell, then, his neighbor Tom Wolfe said to him and to Faulkner and to all the many talents of the modern South. Because you can't ever, really, try as you will, go home again."


"Maxwell, when he loosens the shackles which have married him to the past, has a chance of becoming the painter of the most dangerous nudes in America, as Maillol's nudes are dangerous, because there is, in his concept of the female form, adoration, veneration, desire, the wit of well-being, the promise of enrichment."


"In this day of Mondrian's fiendish austerity, of Moholoy-Nagy's sometimes bleakly scientific functionalism, of Kandinsky's astral trapezoids, there is a place in art for sheer romance, for flesh over honest bones, for mysteries in hair, for odor and sound."

Maxwell can also be viewed as contemporary of N.C. Wyeth. Maxwell and Wyeth each illustrated five novels for Rafael Sabatini[10]. Wyeth and Maxwell both illustrated works for C.S. Forester's popular Horatio Hornblower series. Wyeth and Maxwell each illustrated versions of Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse. Wyeth and Maxwell both illustrated books for Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, the authors of Mutiny on the Bounty (Wyeth) and No More Gas (Maxwell). No More Gas originally appeared in a c. 1939 Saturday Evening Post as Out of Gas. Today, Maxwell's original Alan Eckert illustrations also adorn recent reprint editions of Alan Eckert's novels, including THE FRONTIERSMEN, WILDERNESS EMPIRE and THE CONQUERORS.

While distinctions between artists and illustrators have not always favored the quiet work of the 20th century book and magazine illustrator, John Alan Maxwell was recognized in 1936 as one of the top ten illustrators in the country by the Society of Illustrators. Today his body of work, as reflected by the authors for whom he illustrated--can only be described as prolific and important--if Buck, Steinbeck, and the other authors he represented can be so described.

[edit] Partial List of Maxwell's works

  • Hopper, James Marie, 1876-1956 Medals of honor, with illustrations by John Alan Maxwell
  • Interior Artwork; Colliers Aug 13 ’27 Loot • Albert Payson Terhune • ss; illus. John Alan Maxwell
  • Interior Artwork; The Golden Book Magazine Apr ’30
  • The Flight to Varennes Part 2 of 4 • Alexandre Dumas; trans. by Richard S. Garnett • sl, 1930; illus. John Alan Maxwell
  • Interior Artwork; The Golden Book Magazine Nov ’30
  • Mary, Queen of Scots • Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve • bg (r); illus. John Alan Maxwell
  • Cover Artist; The Golden Book Magazine Jul ’35 Golden Book Magazine [v22 #127, July 1935] (Review of Reviews, 25¢, 128pp, small pulp, cover by John Alan Maxwell); Reprint magazine. [PSP]
  • Cover Artist; The Golden Book Magazine Aug ’35 Golden Book Magazine [v22 #128, August 1935] (Review of Reviews, 25¢, 128pp, small pulp, cover by John Alan Maxwell); Partial contents from EBAY auction.
  • Interior Artwork; Ladies Home Journal Oct ’36 Fair Day • Ruth Burr Sanborn • ss; illus. John Alan Maxwell
  • Interior Artwork; Colliers Aug 1 ’42 The Baltimore Burnt-Eyes • Herbert Ravenel Sass • ss; illus. John Alan Maxwell
  • Interior Artwork; The Country Gentleman Oct ’42 Biography • Will F. Jenkins • ss; illus. John Alan Maxwell
  • Interior Artwork; Woman’s Home Companion Sep ’44 A Curse on Thee, Cordelia • Helen Strass • ss; illus. John Alan Maxwell
  • Interior Artwork; Woman’s Home Companion Aug ’45 A Pair of Wings • Edita Morris • ss; illus. John Alan Maxwell
  • Interior Artwork; The American Magazine Jan ’48 Flight into Spring • Bianca Bradbury • ss; illus. John Alan Maxwell
  • Collier's Magazine December 10, 1927 Edgar Ain't Wuth It a short story by Ernest Poole. Illustrated by John Alan Maxwell.
  • Collier's Magazine December 24, 1927 A Way With Women a short story by John B. Kennedy with illustrations by John Alan Maxwell
  • Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1957. The gentleman from Indianapolis; a treasury of Booth Tarkington, edited by John Beecroft. Illustrated by John Alan Maxwell

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.etsu.edu/cass/archives/Collections/afindaid/a579.html East Tennessee State University: Sherrod Library
  2. ^ Student transcripts: Art Students League
  3. ^ Student transcripts: Art Students League
  4. ^ Seasons of Life: American Impressionism and Frank Vincent DuMond
  5. ^ Major Exhibition on New York's Famed Tenth Street Studio Building- A Fascinating Chapter in the Developing National Art Scene
  6. ^ “John Alan Maxwell: A Long, Distinguished Career” article by Dorothy Hamill from Johnson City Press-Chronicle, January 17, 1981
  7. ^ Pearl Buck's Portrait of Her Fighting Missionary Father, (New York Times, November 29, 1936.)
  8. ^ "He Left a Legacy: Johnson City Press Chronicle, April, 1984.
  9. ^ Nostalgia and Nudes, Esquire Magazine, February 1948, pp. 94-95.
  10. ^ http://www.rafaelsabatini.com/rsillus.html


[edit] External links