Dean Cornwell

1892-1960

Dean Cornwell began his career as an illustrator in 1914 and worked steadily until his death at sixty-eight. His art appeared regularly in popular magazines and important books written by a number of the most outstanding authors, including Pearl S. Buck, Lloyd Douglas, Edna Ferber, Ernest Hemingway, W. Somerset Maugham, and Owen Wister. This left-handed illustrator painted more than twenty murals for various public institutions and in the process became one of the nation’s most popular muralists.

Cornwell was born on March 5, 1892 in Louisville, Kentucky and his father, Charles L. Cornwell, a civil engineer, largely influenced the young boy’s interest in drawing due to his drafting of industrial subjects for hours on end. Because of his father’s engineering career, there were always sketches of bridges and railroads found around the Cornwell house and they intrigued young Dean who found it incredulous that they could be drawn so exactly.

A similar influence on his career was the nearby Louisville and Portland Canal constructed during the Industrial Revolution. As a result of its magnetic attraction for the young boy, one of Cornwell’s earliest drawings at 13, is entitled ‘Tell City’, a sketch of a steamboat passing through the Louisville and Portland Canal.

He received his first training from Paul Plaschke at the local YMCA, and by age 18, he was a cartoonist for the Louisville Herald. In 1911, he moved to Chicago where he worked in the art department for the Chicago Tribune and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1914, he received his first major commission, which was for The Red Book Magazine, and in 1915, he moved to New York and enrolled in the Art Students League and then at Harvey Dunn's school of illustration in Leonia, New Jersey. It was in New York that Cornwell met Charles Chapman and studied under Harvey Dunn, a leading disciple of Howard Pyle. Harvey Dunn proved to be a great influence on Cornwell in respect to color theory and composition. In New York, he was also a protege of Nicolai Fechin, the Russian portraitist who had arrived in New York in 1923, and some of this conviction about painting may have come from Fechin.

Dean was also lucky to study under the notable Frank Brangwyn, an English muralist of worldwide fame. In 1927, he began a five-year period of mural painting in California including the Los Angeles Public Library and the Lincoln Memorial Shrine in Redlands. and he assisted David Siqueiros with the Olvera Street mural, América Tropical. He also did murals at The Bethlehem Steel Company, New York's General Motors Building, the 1939 World's Fair, the Lincoln Memorial in Redlands, California, and Rockefeller Center.

Dean Cornwell’s work reveals a combination of dynamic colors with a formal composition of the elements he wished to capture within a limited space. He was known to create countless studies on paper before finally committing an image to canvas. This on-going refining process was an approach which created magnificent results, and his works were promptly accepted by art directors and publishers for the finest magazines including; Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and The American Magazine.

By the 1930’s and 1940’s, Dean Cornwell became known as the ‘Dean of Illustrators,’ with his patriotic images and war posters everywhere, as were his advertisements for blue chip companies like Seagrams, Palmolive Soap, Scripps-Howard newspapers, Coca-Cola, and General Motors. Cornwell painted a series of advertisements for Wyeth Laboratories, which commemorated important occasions in the history of medicine, such as ‘Conquerors of Yellow Fever’.

The Wyeth commission advertisements became collectibles if one could be found that was not badly faded for having been on display in a drugstore window.

Paintings by Cornwell have been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Chicago Art Institute and the National Academy of Design. He taught and lectured at the Art Students League in New York City and at museums and art societies throughout the United States. James Montgomery Flagg paid him a tribute when he said, “Cornwell is the illustrator par excellence-his work is approached by few and overtopped by none...he is a born artist.

He died in New York City where he had been a member of the Salmagundi Club.