A date you can't refuse

During the nineties, when I trawled Ebay for all kinds of Tenggren art, I bought this great advertisement, cut from Saturday Evening Post. I have always thought it to be one of Gustaf Tenggren's most beautiful paintings, applying his fairy tale sense to a professional context, including one of his favorite themes throughout his career, the Arabian Nights motif.

Dromedary Dates advertisement, Saturday Evening Post Christmas issue 1929

So I was quite excited when I got an e-mail with some blurred iPhone photos and an inquiry from the owner. She had inherited from her father, who in his turn had saved it from being put in the garbage at a company cleaning. After a closer look I could confirm that it was indeed the stunning original for this ad. 

Original painting for the advertisement above, pencil and watercolor on Whatman artboard.

It's very rare that you see one of Tenggren's advertisement paintings. They seem to have been kept at the printer or hidden in the piles of art in the backrooms of the ad bureaus, as a lot of other great illustration art. So it's wonderful to see that an almost ninety year old painting has survived in pretty good shape. From Tenggren's order book we learn that this commission for Dromedary dates was ordered by Pedlar & Ryan Agency for Saturday Evening Post's Christmas issue 1929. It was completed in September 19th that year, and Tenggren was paid $650 for the job ten days later, September 29th. A sum Tenggren was accustomed to, being one of the top paid illustrators, just a decade after his arrival from Sweden.

Just a month later, at the 29th of October 1929, was the date of the Black Tuesday which started the depression and put a black cloud over USA for the next ten years.

Elegant as ever

This image was published in November 29, 1956. The famous Saturday Evening Post Cover with Walt Disney had been published just a couple of weeks ago and the local Maine paper The Boothbay Register was making a visit by the artist. At the time his main scope was to meet the deadline for the 100 full color illustrations for Arabian Nights, that were to be delivered in December.

Gustaf Tenggren had just recently celebrated his 60 year birthday in November 3, 1956, when this picture was published.
He doesn't look too overwhelmed, being disturbed in his work.

This 60 year old gentleman is painting along in a nice suit and and tie. On the drawing board is one of the stunning pages illustrating a ferocious fight at sea. It all turned out to be one of his most beautiful books ever. Below is the remarkable original, kept in the vaults of Kerlan Collection in University of Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Full page from Sindbad the Sailor, Margaret Seifer's compilation of Golden Tales from Arabian Nights
published by Simon & Schuster in 1957.
Kerlan collection of the University of Minnesota Libraries with permissions from the Archives and Special Collections.

Saturday Evening Post cover

Some weeks ago I spent four days with the Tenggren holdings at the Kerlan Collection by the University of Minnesota, MN. I was there to do research for my Tenggren biography, which is planned to be released autumn 2014. I had the opportunity to browse through a number of interesting items of Tenggren’s, among these this little folder from the Saturday Evening Post from September 1956, presumably an in-house staff publication. Also in November 1956, the famous Tenggren cover for Saturday Evening Post with Walt Disney on the train was published, illustrating Diane Disney Miller’s article “My dad Walt Disney”. The folder describes the process of the cover from idea to finished painting.

It’s great to see Ken Stuart’s sketches for the various cover ideas, compared with Tenggren’s final well-known artwork. Especially the little addition of Jiminy Cricket is fun to learn about.

The finished cover