Not exactly held in reverence like Scouting's Norman Rockwell, another artist also became famous for his use of Boy Scouts in his work. Before Norman Rockwell became famous, there was J. C. Leyendecker. Maybe you need to be of a certain age for that statement to ring any bells. But regardless of your personal time frame, you’re likely to be familiar with the warm, wonderful, dramatic or humorous images that graced the covers of the Saturday Evening Post in the first half of the 20th century.
Many of those images were the work of beloved illustrator Norman Rockwell. However, Leyendecker was there first, and actually there more often. Between 1898 and 1918, he created 48 cover images for Collier’s magazine, and near the turn of the century he produced the first of 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, a number that tops Rockwell’s total.
Leyendecker also created elegant advertisements for men’s clothing at a time when dressing for dinner involved far more attention to fashion than today’s “no shirt, no shoes, no service” signs require. His images of cherubic children enjoying Kelloggs’ Corn Flakes were favorites in many American households as well. The popularity of Leyendecker’s illustrations has been attributed to his ability to convey the essence of everyday life through paintings that incorporated high drama, romance and humor.
--contributed by fellow blogger Keith Claussen, October 29, 2009
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