1908 COLES PHILLIPS VALENTINE DAY LOVE ROMANCE FASHION LIFE ART COVER FC2409  

DATE OF THIS  ** ORIGINAL **  ITEM: 1908

THIS IS AN ORIGINAL LIFE MAGAZINE COVER PLEASE LOOK OVER CAREFULLY FOR SIZE AND CONDITION!

ILLUSTRATOR/ARTIST:

Clarence Coles Phillips (October 3, 1880 – June 13, 1927) was an American artist and illustrator who signed his early works C. Coles Phillips, but after 1911 worked under the abbreviated name, Coles Phillips. He is known for his stylish images of women and a signature use of negative space in the paintings he created for advertisements and the covers of popular magazines.

Phillips was born in Springfield, Ohio, the son of Anna Seys and Jacob Phillips. From 1902 to 1904, he attended Kenyon College in his native state, where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. His illustrations were published in the 1901–1904 editions of the school's yearbook, The Reveille.[2]

After leaving Kenyon, Phillips moved to Manhattan, determined to earn a living through his art. He took night classes for three months at the Chase School of Art—his only formal artistic training—before establishing his own advertising agency. One of Phillips's employees was the young Edward Hopper, his former classmate.

In 1907, Phillips met with J. A. Mitchell, the publisher of Life magazine, and was hired onto its staff at the age of twenty-six. Phillips would be associated with the magazine throughout his life.

The work of Phillips quickly became popular with the Life readers. In May 1908, he created a cover for the magazine that featured his first "fadeaway girl" design with a figure whose clothing matched, and disappeared into, the background. Phillips developed this idea in many subsequent covers.

Phillips's use of negative space allowed the viewer to "fill-in" the image; it also reduced printing costs for the magazine, as "the novelty of the technique and the striking design qualities masked the fact that Life was getting by with single color or two-color covers in a day when full-color covers were de rigueur for the better magazines". Phillips worked in watercolor and always painted from life; according to his biographer, Michael Schau, "he refused to work from photographs or to use the pantograph".

Phillips produced cover art for other national magazines besides Life, including Good Housekeeping, which for two years (beginning in July 1912) made him their sole cover artist. Phillips also created many advertising images for makers of women's clothing, and for such clients as the Overland automobile company and Oneida Community flatware. His series depicting women wearing Holeproof Hosiery products was considered daring for its tim] Phillips's works also appear in the 1921 and 1922 editions of the U. S. Naval Academy yearbook, Lucky Bag.

From 1905 until his death, Phillips lived and worked in New Rochelle, New York. His work habits were regular; his other activities included raising pigeons, a hobby he had pursued from the age of eight years.

In December 1907 Phillips met Teresa Hyde, a nurse who became his most frequent model during his early years. They married in early 1910.

In 1924 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the kidney (Renal TB), and for the remainder of his life he was frequently ill. In January 1927, when problems with his eyesight made painting difficult, he dedicated himself to writing. Phillips died in New Rochelle at his home, of his kidney ailment on June 13, 1927, at the age of forty-seven. The funeral service was held on June 14 at the Sutton Manor home in New Rochelle and officiated by the Rev. Paul Gordon Favour from Trinity Episcopal Church of New Rochelle. Artist and friend, J.C. Leyendecker eulogized him as an artist "unique in his field, one with a highly developed sense of decoration and color... he was ahead of most men in depicting the American type of young womanhood." The body was then taken to Fresh Pond Crematory for cremation.

Phillips's works are often exhibited alongside those of other notable graphic artists. In 2002, the Swann Gallery's “American Beauties: Drawings from the Golden Age of Illustration,” featured Phillips, Charles Dana Gibson, Wladyslaw Benda, and Nell Brinkley, among others. Phillips was also included in the Norman Rockwell Museum's "Toast of the Town: Norman Rockwell and the Artists of New Rochelle," and in "Illustrating Modern Life: The Golden Age of American Illustration from the Kelly Collection” at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. In 2015, the Oneida Community Mansion House presented an exhibition focused on Phillips’s ads created for Oneida silverware from 1911 to 1924.



SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS/DESCRIPTIVE WORDS:    

Life is an American magazine published weekly from 1883 to 1972, as an intermittent "special" until 1978, a monthly from 1978 until 2000, and an online supplement since 2008. During its golden age from 1936 to 1972, Life was a wide-ranging weekly general-interest magazine known for the quality of its photography, and was one of the nation's most popular magazines, regularly reaching one-quarter of the population.

Life was published independently for its first 53 years until 1936 as a general-interest and light entertainment magazine, heavy on illustrations, jokes, and social commentary. It featured some of the most important writers, editors, illustrators and cartoonists of its time: Charles Dana Gibson, Norman Rockwell and Jacob Hartman Jr. Gibson became the editor and owner of the magazine after John Ames Mitchell died in 1918. During its later years, the magazine offered brief capsule reviews (similar to those in The New Yorker) of plays and movies running in New York City, but with the innovative touch of a colored typographic bullet resembling a traffic light, appended to each review: green for a positive review, red for a negative one, and amber for mixed notices.

In 1936, Time publisher Henry Luce bought Life solely for its title, and greatly redesigned the publication. LIFE (stylized in all caps) became the first all-photographic American news magazine, and it dominated the market for several decades, with a circulation peaking at over 13.5 million copies a week. One striking image published in the magazine was Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph of a nurse in a sailor's arms, taken on August 14, 1945, during a VJ-Day celebration in New York's Times Square. The magazine's role in the history of photojournalism is considered its most important contribution to publishing. Its prestige attracted the memoirs of President Harry S. Truman, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and General Douglas MacArthur, all serialized in its pages.

After 2000, Time Inc. continued to use the Life brand for special and commemorative issues. Life returned to regularly scheduled issues as a weekly newspaper supplement from 2004 to 2007. The website life.com, originally one of the channels on Time Inc.'s Pathfinder service, was for a time in the late 2000s managed as a joint venture with Getty Images under the name See Your World, LLC. On January 30, 2012, the Life.com URL became a photo channel on Time.com.

1883 humor and general interest magazine

Life was founded on January 4, 1883, in a New York City artist's studio at 1155 Broadway, as a partnership between John Ames Mitchell and Andrew Miller. Mitchell held a 75% interest in the magazine with the remaining 25% held by Miller. Both men retained their holdings until their deaths. Miller served as secretary-treasurer of the magazine and managed the business side of the operation. Mitchell, a 37-year-old illustrator who used a $10,000 inheritance to invest in the weekly magazine, served as its publisher. He also created the first Life name-plate with cupids as mascots and later on, drew its masthead of a knight leveling his lance at the posterior of a fleeing devil. Then he took advantage of a new printing process using zinc-coated plates, which improved the reproduction of his illustrations and artwork. This edge helped because Life faced stiff competition from the best-selling humor magazines Judge and Puck, which were already established and successful. Edward Sandford Martin was brought on as Life's first literary editor; the recent Harvard University graduate was a founder of the Harvard Lampoon.

The motto of the first issue of Life was: "While there's Life, there's hope." The new magazine set forth its principles and policies to its readers:

We wish to have some fun in this paper...We shall try to domesticate as much as possible of the casual cheerfulness that is drifting about in an unfriendly world...We shall have something to say about religion, about politics, fashion, society, literature, the stage, the stock exchange, and the police station, and we will speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how.

The magazine was a success and soon attracted the industry's leading contributors, of which the most important was Charles Dana Gibson. Three years after the magazine was founded, the Massachusetts native first sold Life a drawing for $4: a dog outside his kennel howling at the Moon. Encouraged by a publisher, also an artist, Gibson was joined in Life early days by illustrators such as Palmer Cox (creator of the Brownie), A. B. Frost, Oliver Herford and E. W. Kemble. Life's literary roster included the following: John Kendrick Bangs, James Whitcomb Riley and Brander Matthews.

Mitchell was accused of anti-Semitism at a time of high rates of immigration to New York of eastern European Jews. When the magazine blamed the theatrical team of Klaw & Erlanger for Chicago's Iroquois Theater Fire in 1903, many people complained. Life's drama critic, James Stetson Metcalfe, was barred from the 47 Manhattan theatres controlled by the Theatrical Syndicate. Life published caricatures of Jews with large noses.

Several individuals would publish their first major works in Life. In 1908 Robert Ripley published his first cartoon in Life, 20 years before his Believe It or Not! fame. Norman Rockwell's first cover for Life magazine, Tain't You, was published May 10, 1917. His paintings were featured on Life's cover 28 times between 1917 and 1924. Rea Irvin, the first art director of The New Yorker and creator of the character "Eustace Tilley", began his career by drawing covers for Life.

This version of Life took sides in politics and international affairs, and published pro-American editorials. After Germany attacked Belgium in 1914, Mitchell and Gibson undertook a campaign to push the U.S. into the war. Gibson drew the Kaiser as a bloody madman, insulting Uncle Sam, sneering at crippled soldiers, and shooting Red Cross nurses.

Following Mitchell's death in 1918, Gibson bought the magazine for $1 million, but the end of World War I had brought on social change. Life's brand of humor was outdated, as readers wanted more daring and risque works, and Life struggled to compete. A little more than three years after purchasing Life, Gibson quit and turned the decaying property over to publisher Clair Maxwell and treasurer Henry Richter. Gibson retired to Maine to paint and lost interest in the magazine.

In 1920, Gibson selected former Vanity Fair staffer Robert E. Sherwood as editor. A WWI veteran and member of the Algonquin Round Table, Sherwood tried to inject sophisticated humor onto the pages. Life published Ivy League jokes, cartoons, flapper sayings and all-burlesque issues. Beginning in 1920, Life undertook a crusade against Prohibition. It also tapped the humorous writings of Frank Sullivan, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Franklin Pierce Adams and Corey Ford. Among the illustrators and cartoonists were Ralph Barton, Percy Crosby, Don Herold, Ellison Hoover, H. T. Webster, Art Young and John Held, Jr.

Life had 250,000 readers in 1920, but as the Jazz Age rolled into the Great Depression, the magazine lost money and subscribers. By the time Maxwell and editor George Eggleston took over, Life had switched from publishing weekly to monthly. The two men went to work revamping its editorial style to meet the times, which resulted in improved readership. However, Life had passed its prime and was sliding toward financial ruin. The New Yorker, debuting in February 1925, copied many of the features and styles of Life; it recruited staff from its editorial and art departments.  Another blow to Life's circulation came from raunchy humor periodicals such as Ballyhoo and Hooey, which ran what can be termed "outhouse" gags. In 1933, Esquire joined Life's competitors. In its final years, Life struggled to make a profit.

Announcing the end of Life, Maxwell stated: "We cannot claim, like Mr. Gene Tunney, that we resigned our championship undefeated in our prime. But at least we hope to retire gracefully from a world still friendly."

For Life's final issue in its original format, 80-year-old Edward Sandford Martin was recalled from editorial retirement to compose its obituary. He wrote:

That Life should be passing into the hands of new owners and directors is of the liveliest interest to the sole survivor of the little group that saw it born in January 1883 ... As for me, I wish it all good fortune; grace, mercy and peace and usefulness to a distracted world that does not know which way to turn nor what will happen to it next. A wonderful time for a new voice to make a noise that needs to be heard!


Life was an American magazine of humor, commentary, and entertainment founded by John Ames Mitchell in the 19th century. (He also edited it for the majority of its run, until his death.)

Publication History

Life began in 1883. No issue copyright renewals were found for this serial. The first copyright-renewed contribution is from June 14, 1929.   In 1936, the magazine was bought by Henry Luce of Time, Inc., who launched a new magazine with the same name but completely different staff and subscription base. We are not aware of active copyrights in the issues linked below.



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