"Queen of the May, Saturday Evening Post Cover"   Lot no. 3296

Add to Want List


By Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874-1951)

1937
31.00" x 24.00", Framed 38.00" x 32.00"
Oil on Canvas
Signed Lower Right
SOLD

Click any of the images above for additional views.



Cover of The Saturday Evening Post, May 15, 1937

The title “Queen of the May” is used as a double joke. The phrase literally goes back to Maia, the Roman goddess of Spring, for whom celebrations have been devoted since antiquity, and there are still locales that continue this tradition of electing a girl to lead a May Day parade to celebrate the season.

May is also the season for Spring-cleaning, and the majority of cleaning maids in America in Leyendecker’s day were Irish.

Bringing the two ideas back together, Maia represents purity and growth, and so, ironically, does J.C.L.’s charwoman. Her bandana stands in for the queen’s traditional tiara. She is set on a raised dais of honor, and J.C. arranges the maid’s tools as if they were heraldic devices for royalty.



Explore related art collections: Women as Subjects / $100,000 & Above / Saturday Evening Post Covers

See all original artwork by Joseph Christian Leyendecker

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Joseph Christian Leyendecker was born in Montabaur, Germany, and came to America at the age of eight. Showing an early interest in painting, he got his first job at 16 in a Chicago engraving house on the strength of some larger pictures he had painted on kitchen oilcloth. In the evenings after work, he studied under Vanderpoel at the Chicago Art Institute, and saved for five years to be able to go to France and attend the Academie Julian in Paris.

Upon his return, as a thoroughly trained artist with immense technical facility, Leyendecker had no difficulty in obtaining top commissions for advertising illustrations and cover designs for the leading publications. His first Post cover was done in 1899, and he did well over 300 more during the next 40 years. Among the most famous of these was his annual New Years Baby series.

His advertising illustrations made his clients famous. The Arrow Collar Man was a byword for the debonair, handsome male, and women wrote thousands of love letters to him in care of Cluett Peabody & Company. His illustrations for Kuppenheimer Clothes were equally successful in promoting an image of suited elegance. He was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1977.A major retrospective exhibition of Leyendecker's work was mounted at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1997-98.

Joseph Christian Leyendecker was born in Montabaur, Germany, and came to America at the age of eight. Showing an early interest in painting, he got his first job at 16 in a Chicago engraving house on the strength of some larger pictures he had painted on kitchen oilcloth. In the evenings after work, he studied under Vanderpoel at the Chicago Art Institute, and saved for five years to be able to go to France and attend the Academie Julian in Paris.

Upon his return, as a thoroughly trained artist with immense technical facility, Leyendecker had no difficulty in obtaining top commissions for advertising illustrations and cover designs for the leading publications. His first Post cover was done in 1899, and he did well over 300 more during the next 40 years. Among the most famous of these was his annual New Years Baby series.

His advertising illustrations made his clients famous. The Arrow Collar Man was a byword for the debonair, handsome male, and women wrote thousands of love letters to him in care of Cluett Peabody & Company. His illustrations for Kuppenheimer Clothes were equally successful in promoting an image of suited elegance. He was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1977.A major retrospective exhibition of Leyendecker's work was mounted at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1997-98.


Kent Steine