PLEASE SEE PHOTO FOR DETAILS AND CONDITION OF THIS NEW POSTER
SIZE OF POSTER PRINT - 12 X 18 INCHES
DATE OF ORIGINAL PRINT, POSTER OR ADVERT - 1937
At PosterPrint Shop we look for rare & unusual ITEMS OF commercial graphics from throughout the world.
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MOST POSTERPRINTS HAVE IMAGE SIZE OF 11.5 X 17.5.
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DESCRIPTION OF ITEM: additional information:
William Peter Welsh (1889–1984) was a muralist, portrait painter, and illustrator from Kentucky as well as a soldier who served in both world wars and in the Mexican Border campaign with General Pershing in 1916. He died at age 95 in his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky. His mural painting Lexington Street Scene, October 1793 was at the Kentuckian Hotel on High Street and was recreated by the artist after its destruction and displayed at Hymon's Department store with prints also sold. His painting "Prisoner of War" is part of the Art Institute of Chicago's collection. He also painted murals for the Chicago Room of Palmer House and did a series of European style poster advertisements for Pullman sleeping cars. He won awards and recognition for the campaign. He worked in Illinois. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1936 Summer Olympics.
William Peter Welsh was born to Bartholomew J. Welsh and Sara Ellen Cunningham King Welsh in Lexington, Kentucky. He was one of six children, four boys and two girls: an older brother, King; a sister, Agatha; Welsh; twins Barry and August (Gus); and Marguerite.
Welsh attended Saint Paul's, a boys-only school taught by nuns. School for him started at 7:30 a.m. and he attended Mass each day before class.
Welsh's father, Bartholomew, died of cancer following a three-year bout with an aneurism that finally burst. Welsh was three years old, when his father developed the aneurism. After his father's death, his mother Sara supported the children by living in boarding homes that belonged to relatives and friends so she could work and earn money.
Welsh took his first job, a summer position at the Lexington Leader, at age 12 making $2 a week. His boss, Sam Roberts, fired him after the summer so he could return to school. At age 14, he started working at the Kaufman Clothing Company in Lexington where he was soon promoted and made $3 a week, and later $6. His boss at this store, Phil Strauss, would prove influential in his success as an artist.
When Welsh was 15, he began studying under Mary Kinkead, his first painting teacher, at the Ella Williams School for Girls in Lexington. He was one of only a few boys who attended. It was here that he met Henrietta Clay. They were later sweethearts and engaged. After Clay ended their engagement for another man, they remained good friends. In his oral history account, Welsh credited his time at Ella Williams studying under Kinkead as what would inspire him to travel abroad and study art.
Welsh got into Academie Julien and Atelier Delecleuse in Paris, France thanks to a connection of his Lexington art teacher, Mary Kinkead. His boss at the Kaufman Clothing Company, Phil Strauss, funded Welsh's time in Paris with a monthly check of $40 because he trusted Mart Kinkead's judgement that Welsh was suited for Paris. After he returned from Europe, he spent two years in Lexington doing odd art jobs and sports activities at a YMCA. He then went to New York to pursue art. He had a promise of $25 a week in New York for working in George Ford Morris's studio (Morris was a New York horse painter). While in New York, he worked and attended the Arts Student League.
Welsh first enlisted in the Army in 1914 at the First New York Field Artillery, Battery B as a private despite only have one good eye (his left). His first field experience was in 1916 during his time serving with General Pershing in the Mexican Border Campaign in search of Pancho Villa. He never encountered Villa. After his Mexican Border tour of duty, he went overseas with his regiment and served in Brittany, Brest. Here his French language skills, acquired during his art school days in Paris, made him invaluable to his regiment. After Brest, he was shipped to Bordeaux to a camp called Desseus. Soon after, his French language skills grabbed the attention of his superiors, along with his artistic training, and he was transferred to Langres, where he worked with a camouflage unit. Later, during the second world war, Welsh joined again, this time at age 52. He again worked in camouflage, this time in charge of a St. Louis unit for a short time. He was later an executive officer in the same unit to his replacement officer, a younger man named Austin who was 35 and sent from Washington to replace Welsh.
During World War II, while in his 50s, Welsh received a commission to use his art skills to document the war. Welsh landed in Japan in October 1945 and left in July 1946 after the military requested that he go overseas and paint and draw images for historical war records. He chose the Japanese theater and spent ten months drawing and painting the destruction and beauty he found in the country. He completed ten paintings while there. He would later give presentations and speeches about his time in Japan to various clubs in Kentucky. Pictures of his Japanese paintings appeared in newspapers across several states such as the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Lexington Herald-Leader, and others.
- American Campaign Medal
- Asiatic Pacific Campaign Medal
- World War I Victory Medal with Star
- World War II Victory Medal
- Mexican Border Ribbon
- Personal Commendation (Hoyt. S. Vandenberg, Chief of Staff, United States Air Force, 1953).
Among Welsh's most notable work was his "Lexington Street Scene" a 24 foot-long, 6-foot high mural that was thought to have been destroyed during the demolition of the Kentuckian Hotel. He re-painted his famous mural in 1975. Members of The Welsh Society rediscovered the original mural in 1981.
Welsh was born into a Catholic family, but never took religion seriously. By the time his oral history was published in 1982, he said he neither believed in life after death nor eternal punishment and reward. He said he lived by no philosophy or religion, thinking both to be "utter nonsense"[5] and said what got him through life was his ability and passion to paint.
Art Deco, short for the French Arts Décoratifs, and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the United States and Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Through styling and design of the exterior and interior of anything from large structures to small objects, including how people look (clothing, fashion and jewelry), Art Deco has influenced bridges, buildings (from skyscrapers to cinemas), ships, ocean liners, trains, cars, trucks, buses, furniture, and everyday objects like radios and vacuum cleaners.
It got its name after the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) held in Paris.
Art Deco combined modern styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials. During its heyday, it represented luxury, glamour, exuberance, and faith in social and technological progress.
The Art Deco style, which originated in France just before World War I, had an important impact on architecture and design in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The most famous examples are the skyscrapers of New York City including the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center. It combined modern aesthetics, fine craftsmanship and expensive materials, and became the symbol of luxury and modernity. While rarely used in residences, it was frequently used for office buildings, government buildings, train stations, movie theaters, diners and department stores. It also was frequently used in furniture, and in the design of automobiles, ocean liners, and everyday objects such as toasters and radio sets. In the late 1930s, during the Great Depression, it featured prominently in the architecture of the immense public works projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. The style competed throughout the period with the modernist architecture, and came to an abrupt end in 1939 with the beginning of World War II. The style was rediscovered in the 1960s, and many of the original buildings have been restored and are now historical landmarks.
The Art Deco style had been born in Paris, but no buildings were permitted in that city which were higher than Notre Dame Cathedral (with the sole exception of the Eiffel Tower). As a result, the United States soon took the lead in building tall buildings. The first skyscrapers had been built in Chicago in the 1880s in the Beaux-Arts or neoclassical style. In the 1920s, New York architects used the new Art Deco style to build the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. The Empire State building was the tallest building in the world for forty years.
The decoration of the interior and exterior of the skyscrapers was classic Art Deco, with geometric shapes and zigzag patterns. The Chrysler Building, by William Van Alen (1928–30), updated the traditional gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals with sculptures on the building corners in the shape of Chrysler radiator ornaments.
Another major landmark of the style was the RCA Victor Building (now the General Electric Building), by John Walter Cross. It was covered from top to bottom with zig-zags and geometric patterns, and had a highly ornamental crown with geometric spires and lightning bolts of stone. The exterior featured bas-relief sculptures by Leo Friedlander and Lee Lawrie, and a mosaic by Barry Faulkner that required more than a million pieces of enamel and glass.
While the skyscraper Art Deco style was mostly used for corporate office buildings, it also became popular for government buildings, since all city offices could be contained in one building on a minimal amount of land. The city halls of Los Angeles, California and Buffalo, New York were built in the style, as well as the new capital building of the State of Louisiana.
There was no specific Art Deco style of painting in the United States, though paintings were often used as decoration, especially in government buildings and office buildings. In the 1932 the Public Works of Art Project was created to give work to artists unemployed because the Great Depression. In a year, it commissioned more than fifteen thousand works of art. It was succeeded in 1935 by the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, or WPA. prominent American artists were commissioned by the Federal Art Project to paint murals in government buildings, hospitals, airports, schools and universities. Some the America's most famous artists, including Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, Georgia O'Keeffe and Maxine Albro took part in the program. The celebrated Mexican painter Diego Rivera also took part in the program, painting a mural. The paintings were in a variety of styles, including regionalism, social realism, and American scenic painting.
A few murals were also commissioned for Art Deco skyscrapers, notably Rockefeller Center in New York. Two murals were commissioned for the lobby, one by John Steuart Curry and another by Diego Rivera. The owners of the building, the Rockefeller family, discovered that Rivera, a Communist, had slipped an image of Lenin into a crowd in the painting, and had it destroyed. The mural was replaced with another by the Spanish artist José Maria Sert.
The Art Deco style appeared early in the graphic arts, in the years just before World War I. It appeared in Paris in the posters and the costume designs of Léon Bakst for the Ballets Russes, and in the catalogs of the fashion designers Paul Poiret. The illustrations of Georges Barbier, and Georges Lepape and the images in the fashion magazine La Gazette du bon ton perfectly captured the elegance and sensuality of the style. In the 1920s, the look changed; the fashions stressed were more casual, sportive and daring, with the woman models usually smoking cigarettes. American fashion magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar quickly picked up the new style and popularized it in the United States. It also influenced the work of American book illustrators such as Rockwell Kent.
In the 1930s a new genre of posters appeared in the United States during the Great Depression. The Federal Art Project hired American artists to create posters to promote tourism and cultural events.
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