Poster Saturday: Leslie's, December 22, 1917 edition

On Saturday I usually put up a poster, if I post in this category at all, but this week I'm posting the cover of the December 22, 1917 edition of Leslie's Illustrated News, which features a Norman Rockwell illustration of an American soldier, presumably in France, opening a Christmas package.  This magazine was published on the same schedule as The Saturday Evening Post and it had some of the same illustrators.

The cover demonstrated what was on the mind of Americans that Christmas of 1917 as American troops began to arrive in Europe.  While the bulk of Americans troops remained in the US at this time they were beginning to show up in Europe and the US had already sustained its first combat casualties, which was fairly remarkable when considering how small the US Army had been just several months prior.

This cover contrast with one we ran yesterday, that of The Saturday Evening Post, which featured an illustration by Joseph Christian Leyendecker.  At this point in time Leyendecker was arguably a more prominent illustrator and worked for a variety of magazines as well as doing commercial illustrations.  Rockwell was a bit of an understudy in some ways to Leyendecker whose career started earlier.  Leyendecker was a German immigrant, arriving at age 8, whose career rivaled if not exceed Rockwell's in this period.*

The Saturday Evening Post, December 22, 1917

Rockwell's World War Two era illustrations of American soldiers would be very notable for being highly technical correct in uniform details.  They weren't gritty combat depictions like those of cartoonist Bill Mauldin (whose cartoons were highly accurate in material details) or the incomparable Howard Brodie, arguably the greatest pen and ink combat artist of all time, or like the haunting paintings of Tom Lea.  But in terms of material details they were excellent, particularly of servicemen training in the US during the war and then later returning to the US post war.  Rockwell's development of running characters served well here, such as the running depiction of Willie Gillis, a typical American serving in uniform during World War Two (although even during the war Rockwell sometimes got uniforms incorrect by basing them on what was in the regulations of the time rather than what was actually being used).**  That is in part what makes these two illustrations, one by Rockwell and one by Leyendecker, interesting. They got some thing fairly seriously wrong.

At the start of World War One the United States had not fielded a large army since the Spanish American War and a really large army since the Civil War. So average people were simply not as familiar with material details of soldier's uniforms and equipment as they later would be.  And coming before the era of good color photography, the illustrator was left without a lot of information to go by. That shows in both of these illustrations.

The Rockwell illustration, depicting a happy American soldier receiving a package of gifts, many of which are useless to his present condition, has the overcoat correct, but the helmet is completely incorrect.  Rockwell appears to have based it on the French Adrian M15 helmet, some of which were in fact issued to American servicemen in France early on. But if that was his goal, he only managed to get some of the odder details of the M15 helmet correct

Indeed, he may have been trying to depict the British Brodie pattern helmet which in fact had been accepted into US service at this time and which would be standardized as the US M1917 helmet.  The saucer shaped helmet with the prominent brim is the one that most U.S. servicemen were equipped with during the war. But if that was his goal, the ridge on the helmet and the flaming cannon ball device, which were on the Adrian helmet, were incorrect.  Such big mistakes would not appear in Rockwell's World War Two illustrations.

Leyendecker's soldier is much more correctly depicted and the uniform details are all correct, except the color is wrong. And this is the second time that Leyendecker had depicted a soldier wearing a uniform of this color.  The color would be pretty close to the German feldgrau color and a person is almost inclined to speculate that Leyendecker was familiar with that color by some means and simply assumed the US uniform was in the same color.  Period photographs would not have corrected him on this as they were in black and white.  Later illustrations by Leyendecker would not repeat the error.

*It's come to be almost assumed that every single issue of The Saturday Evening Post was illustrated by Rockwell over a period of decades, but this simply isn't true.  Rockwell was never the exclusive illustrator of Post covers and he worked for more weekly's than just the Post.  The confusion is understandable however as Rockwell came to develop a style, which was already evident at this time if not fully developed, that truly captured slices of American life.  Highly accurate in detail, they were typically but not always fairly sweet depicts, although they could be sad or even angry.  Their fame is just in that they really were very close depictions of real events in the typical American's life.  

The Post also ran covers by Leyendecker and an entire range of illustrators including female artists such as Marjorie McMein and Sarah Stilwell-Weber.  Rockwell is, of course, be best known today and likely the best of them as well.

**Rockwell had two covers going to press on the same day, and the other one featured one of his recurring characters.  Country Gentleman, which was published by the same publisher as The Saturday Evening Post, featured a "Cousin Reginald" cover.  Cousin Reginald was a character that appeared on the cover of Country Gentleman and was a citified boy whose rural cousins constantly get the better of him.