Earl MacPherson (1910 - 1993)
In 1939, MacPherson was an aspiring glamour artist with a studio on
Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.
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Earl MacPherson. |
One night,
his phone rang with an invitation from Charlie Ward, the president of
Brown and Bigelow, to meet him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Impressed with
the artist's work, Ward invited him to visit the firm's St. Paul
headquarters. After some time spent "hanging around", observing
and learning, MacPherson officially joined the staff in 1942. MacPherson married his first model at Brown and Bigelow, then went on to
create a unique pin-up calendar that would become a standard in the
industry. First published in 1943, his Artist's Sketch Pad became a
million-dollar seller. Each page of the twelve-page calendar bound at the
top with a spiral binder,
featured a primary pin-up figure surrounded by pencil sketches showing the
same model in various poses relating to the central image. Before going to Brown and Bigelow, MacPherson had painted a very famous
pin-up image for the Shaw-Barton Calendar Company. The best-selling image
in the company's 1941 line, Going Places was so popular that Lucky
Strike cigarettes asked to reproduce it on their 1942 calendar with the
caption "Lucky Strike Green Goes to War".
Edgar Earl MacPherson was born on August 3, 1910, in Oklahoma. He moved
to Los Angeles after high school, got a job painting movie posters for a
downtown theatre, and took evening art classes at the Chouinard School of
Art. In 1929, he set up shop at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu,
painting portraits of wealthy guests. McPherson's smashing success with
the Artist's Sketch Pad was followed by another triumph: his two deck
set of playing cards for Brown and Bigelow, called Win, Lose, or Draw,
received a total of 168,000 orders in four months. His
diary-style calendar, Something to Remember, was his last success before
he went off to war in 1944.
Discharged in 1946, after teaching plane decoy recognition to Navy
pilots, he settled on a four-acre ranch in Del Mar, California. He also
hooked up once again with Shaw-Barton and began the first of nine
consecutive years of MacPherson Sketch Book calendars for them. In
1954, Shaw-Barton published a book called Hunting With MacPherson, a
parody with pin-up girls dressed as various hunting birds; the same
year, the artist. wrote and designed a best-selling how-to book entitled
Pin-Up Art for the Waiter Faster Company.
In 1951, MacPherson was stricken with polio, and his assistant, Jerry
Thompson, took over the Sketch Book calendar series under the name T N.
Thompson. In the early 1950s, MacPherson had his own television show in
Arizona; about 1960, he moved to Tahiti and then travelled widely in the
South Pacific. He died in December 1993. |
