In 2014, the Norman Rockwell Museum received a generous gift of the Famous Artists School Collection from the art course’s owners, Magdalen and Robert Livesey. This vast and diverse donation includes original artwork, ephemera, publicity photographs, promotional items, business correspondence, and course materials. My task was to process over 8,000 paintings, drawings, sketches, and cartoons. As a way to identify the art and artist, I relied heavily on the eleven How to make a picture course books by the School’s founding members.

In Austin Briggs’ course book, this pastel sketch can be seen in a photograph of his studio, and as an example of good picture composition, on page 57. Describing his process on story illustration assignments, Briggs explains how he would carefully read the manuscript to determine what passage stands out the most. For this story, the artist made the choice of using a powerful action scene to stop the reader. To make the rough sketch, he drew on tracing paper that was the same size as the magazine page, making allowance for the image bleed and gutter. The final rough drawing was submitted to the art director for approval. Once accepted, Briggs used the rough to pose his models for photographs.

After identifying the creator of this piece, additional information was still needed. A tearsheet that I discovered in the FAS ephemera collection provided the title and publication. Using the new information, a web search was conducted with no luck. Finally, an image of the rough sketch was uploaded to Google images, and a result came back for eBay—the final illustration was being offered for sale. Fortunately, the Museum was able to purchase it to compliment the rough sketch. The actual issue of The Saturday Evening Post and story title are unknown. However, there is hope; the Post has digitized its publication so maybe with a little more sleuthing the answers will be uncovered.

To find out more about Austin Briggs, visit his profile on the Museum’s Illustration History website (IllustrationHistory.org).

Written By: Venus Van Ness

Prior to becoming one of the founding members of the Famous Artists School, Austin Briggs began his early art career working for pulp magazines and drawing comic strips. These minimalist, black and white drawings, often done in pen and ink, was only one of several styles and mediums that Briggs became known for working in over his long and successful career.

In the 1950’s, tastes changed, and Briggs’ style evolved along with it, becoming much more finished and painterly, using full color. By the late 1950’s, his loose, informal style using black and white began to emerge once again for one of his best known series of advertisements done for TV Guide. An interview with Briggs was published in a 1961 issue of Famous Artists Magazine[1] in which he discussed the campaign. He enthusiastically said that he’d “never had an assignment that interested me so much” and was excited to do it because he knew the people in the advertising world so well.

The TV Guide campaign became one of the most successful that Briggs had ever worked on. He believed that it was so effective because he tried to show the people as they really were – natural looking, without pretense and with an eye towards empathy. He elaborated on the importance of empathy in his 1961 interview saying that “the artist must be of the people but stand a little aside. I feel a real empathy toward these people, but am not one of them. I don’t view them with any hostility at all. I see them, and myself, too, as being made by our environment to a great extent. If the campaign had been done dishonestly it would have been just as unsuccessful as all those other campaigns which set out to flatter the advertising industry.”