I recently went on on a trip from Cape Town to Washington, D.C., Seattle, North Cascades National Park, Seattle again, Denver, D.C. again, and then back home to Cape Town, all in three weeks. It was wonderful, but it was too much: too many airports, too many suitcases, too many weird bathroom setups. (Well, two, but that was two too many.) I kept saying to myself, “I’ll be so happy to just be able to hang out at home,” forgetting to take Cape Town winters into consideration and add, “provided that it doesn’t rain nonstop so that staying at home is the only option.”
I went out walking every day when the rain let up, hoping to make it home before the skies opened again. On one of these walks I looked up and saw a double rainbow, which lifted my spirits tremendously. Cape Town is unfortunately not a place where it’s wise to to take out your phone and start snapping away while walking along a busy road, so I don’t have a photo of it. But I assume you’re familiar with the concept.
I haven’t done a magazine illustration post in a while,* so I decided to pay tribute to that moment, and to summer from a Cape Town winter, with a rainbow of summer 1924 magazine covers.
First up in vivid red is Spanish illustrator Eduardo Garcia Benito’s June Vanity Fair cover.**
Imposing a constraint, like “it has to be orange,” makes you expand your horizons. I wasn’t familiar with The Designer, although it must have had a large circulation if it was serializing Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.*** I wasn’t familiar with the cover artist, American illustrator Charles Allan Winter, either.
It’s nice to see Life cover artist Warren Davis drawing something other than his usual half-naked women frolicking around.
You can’t expand your horizons much further than to a short-lived Spanish sports magazine for which the only online reference I could find is a Catalan-language Wikipedia page that has been flagged for possible deletion. The illustrator, Spanish artist Rafael de Penagos, is new to me. He received a gold medal at the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, from which Art Deco got its name (surprisingly, not until the 1960s).
In vibrant blue, a House & Garden cover by French artist André Édouard Marty. Marty, not to be confused with leading French Communist Party member André Marty, was another leading figure in the Art Deco movement.
I’m not of the school of thought that indigo is a color of the rainbow, since squeezing it in between blue and purple throws off the symmetry, but I couldn’t resist these flower-strewing children, drawn by an artist I couldn’t identify.**** This issue of Woman’s Home Companion includes an essay on parenthood by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the last installment of Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s The Home-Maker, an ahead-of-its-time novel about a stay-at-home dad,***** and an illustrated story by N.C. Wyeth. Not bad for fifteen cents.
Here’s the purplest cover I could find, from Vogue regular Pierre Brissaud.******
To wrap things up, here’s a cover by John Holmgren, yet another new-to-me artist, who managed to fit every color of the rainbow onto this Judge cover.
But wait! This is just a SINGLE rainbow.
July slipped into August as I was working on this post, which gave me another month’s worth of magazine covers to work with. Now August is slipping away as well, and I’m back in Washington. At this rate, the leaves will be falling off the trees by the time I post this if I write about each one, so here they all are:
Enjoy the end of summer (or, if you’re in Cape Town, FINALLY the end of winter), everyone!
*Or any other post, for that matter.
**There’s a truly bonkers essay by D.H. Lawrence in this issue called “On Being a Man.” It starts out with a racist account of sitting on a train with an African American man and segues into a discussion of why marriage is literally hell.
***Lewis won, and rejected, the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith. In a written statement, he objected to the criteria for which the prize was awarded: “for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” I’m with Lewis on this, although some said that he was just miffed that he hadn’t won the award for Main Street, published in 1921.
****ChatGPT claimed that the cover artist was Charles Dana Gibson, which I didn’t buy. I asked for a source for this information, and it said, oh, sorry, it’s actually Frances Tipton Hunter. This sounded more plausible but I still wasn’t convinced, so I asked again for the source, at which point ChatGPT threw up its hands and admitted that it was just making stuff up.
*****I spoke about this book at a roundtable on 1920s best-sellers at a conference on Modernism in the UK in 2022.
******As I was finishing up this post I came across this beautiful, and arguably purpler, Vogue cover by George Wolfe Plank.
New on Rereading Our Childhood, the podcast I cohost (or not so new but newer than my last blog post):
Our Favorite Children’s Books from 50 Years Ago
Rereading Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint by Jay Williams and Raymond Abrishkin
Rereading The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Rereading The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Rereading Stuart Little by E.B. White
Rereading February’s Road by John Verney
Reading Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Rereading The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander
Rereading Misty of Chingoteague by Marguerite Henry
Rereading The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin
My Life 100 Years Ago 