Coles Phillips in the Golden Era of Magazines

C. Coles Phillips, 1900, Bain News Service, © Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

In 1907, when Coles Phillips sold his small New York City advertising agency, he had enough money to set himself up for one month as a magazine illustrator. He convinced a landlord to rent him an artist’s studio, promising payment as soon as money from his commissions came through. In truth, Phillips had not yet sold a single drawing, but he worked well under pressure. He studied the market and decided that Life, one of the top general-interest magazines in the country, suited his style and sensibility. For days, he sketched ideas for cartoons, but nothing seemed fresh or inspired. Frustrated, he took his sketch pad to a neighborhood tavern. Across the room, two women—one young and pretty, the other older and handsome—sat at opposite ends of a long wooden table and toasted each other over a shared carafe of wine. It was a simple yet compelling moment that inspired him to draw it.

Despite his lack of artistic training and small-town Ohio background, Phillips had an inordinate amount of confidence. He trusted in his instinct for creating interesting compositions in his drawing and painting. He took his single picture to the Life Building and asked to see the editor, John Ames Mitchell, a former illustrator who had cofounded the magazine with a ten-thousand-dollar inheritance twenty-five years before. His assistant told Phillips that Mitchell looked at artwork only on Wednesday. It was Monday. While Phillips argued with the assistant, Gerald Krone, Life’s business manager, stepped out of his office to investigate the ruckus. He deemed the drawing good enough to take into a meeting with Mitchell. When Mitchell finally met with Phillips, he asked him one question: “Can you produce similar work on a regular basis?” Phillips said yes and left with a check for $150 and a request for more cartoons. Thus began his twenty-year career as an illustrator, his friendship with Mitchell, and a profitable relationship with Life.

The American golden age of illustration lasted from the 1880s through the 1930s, with the number of periodicals rising in the country from seven hundred in 1885 to more than five thousand at the end of the century. For fifty years, newspapers, magazines, and books thrived as the result of the rise in literacy and the proliferation of public libraries, technological advances in printing, and improved transportation for distribution. These publications each hired a stable of artists to supply a variety of illustrated material. If they could meet tight deadlines and set assignments, commercial illustrators made a decent and even lucrative living.

Clarence Coles Phillips was born in 1880 in Springfield, Ohio. His father, Jason, managed the family’s struggling clothing business while

C. Coles Phillips (1880–1927), Know All Men by These Presents, 1910, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal over graphite underdrawing, © Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

his mother, Anna, raised four children. Handsome, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a slight frame, Coles sang in the school choir, raised pigeons, and worked at the neighborhood grocery store after school to help his family’s finances. To make friends, he drew their caricatures and sketched them pictures of animals and images of small-town life. In high school he published illustrations in the American, Springfield’s weekly magazine. His uncle Uhl, one of Ohio’s popular portrait artists, noticed his precocious talent and encouraged him to study art after high school, but his father considered it an impractical profession. He wanted his son to run the family business, but Coles believed that if he wanted to be a serious artist, he needed to move to New York City. Kenyon College was their compromise. He was an average student but found an outlet for his illustrations in the college’s newspaper and yearbook.

C. Coles Phillips (1880–1927), Home Ties, 1909–1912, color lithograph on...