Farmyard (est. 1930)
by Peter Helck (1893-1988)
15 x 21 in., ink wash on board
Coppola Collection

http://www.peterhelck.com

Peter Helck was born in New York City in 1893. He studied art at the Art Students League in Manhattan and later studied in England with muralist Frank Brangwyn.

From the 1920’s through the 1940’s Helck was a successful as a magazine illustrator and advertising artist, and this is typical of his work from this early period.

His commissions were increasingly of industrial scenes, or featured cars, trucks and locomotives. In the 1930s, he also painted pictures of famous automobile races – having been an avid fan of the sport since childhood. In 1944 he did a series of paintings for Esquire magazine in which he recreated the excitement of automobile races from the first decades of the 20th century. To his great satisfaction, these pictures proved very popular, and in the following decades he developed a large market for paintings of old cars. It is for this genre that he is mostly remembered today.

Vogue (est. 1940)
by Laurence Fellows (1885-1964)
18.5 x 11.5 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

Formally trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. Subsequently, Fellows developed his technique in England and specifically in France, where he worked under J.P. Laurens at the Academie Julien.

Upon his return to the US in 1910, Fellows became known for his Vogue-influenced drawing style that focused on shapes as a whole rather than on details. The thin outline and flat tonality were key features of his style at the time, which helped him land jobs with several satirical magazines.

In the 1930’s, Fellows realigned his focus away from this simplistic ad style to more detailed fashion illustrations. As such, he worked for magazine such as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, The American Magazine, and most importantly with Apparel Arts and Esquire magazine, which debuted in 1931 and 1933, respectively. Due to limited supply of male fashion artists, you could find at least one full page illustration by Laurence Fellows in almost every issue. Today, Fellows is most well-known for the drawings from this decade, although he continued to work for Apparel Arts through the 1940’s.

“Couple Outside Farmhouse” (1910)
by Helen Mason Grose (1880-1971)
13.75 x 10 in., pencil on board
Coppola Collection

Helen Bowen Mason Grose was born, lived, and died in Providence, RI. She was an artist and a book illustrator.

She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Museum of Art in Boston, and the Art League in New York City. Her teachers included Sidney Burley (watercolor), Elizabeth Shippen Green (illustration, life), Frank Benson (life), William Howe Foote (illustration, life, pencil, charcoal), N.C. Wyeth (oil, pencil), and George Woodbury (marine painter). In her art, she worked with watercolors, aquatints, pencil, ink, and pastels, and specialized in floral compositions, marine views, architecture, life models, landscapes, portraits, fishing villages, and house and street scenes. Her works can be found in galleries, libraries, and universities in Rhode Island and with many private collectors. Her specialty was as a book illustrator where she excelled for a period of approximately 15 years from 1914 to 1930. Some of the books that she illustrated include the following: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Seven Vagabonds (1916) and The House of the Seven Gables (1924); Kate Douglas Wiggin, Creeping Jenny, and Other New England Stories (1924) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1925); Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1920); R.D. Blackmore, Lorna Doone (1917).

The drawing here is dated 1910, and so appears to be an early work. There is no attribution for its use.