Sunday Christmas Treat.
With apologies to anyone coming along earlier, here is the promised Christmas treat for today, a spectacular series from 1933, with illustrations by Noel Sickles. This may be among the latest work he did for newspapers. The story is by Sigrid Arne, a very busy and acomplished woman, who wrote books and stories for magazines, worked as a clerk for her husband who was a congressman and kept busy until very late in her life. One of her last jobs was a a tour guide at the Capitol.
Regular visitor Fortunato alerted me to the fact that I have originally uploaded the wrong story. Christmas stories such as this were done every year and I accidentally chose the wrong storyfiles from my blog folder. So here is the intended Sickles story. I have left the second story as well, which was beautifully illustrated by Hank Barrow, who also took over from Sickles as AP's resident poltical cartoonist (as shown in my earlier posts on Sickles).
It is interesting to compare the two. Both were writen by Arne, although there is eight years between them. Nickles' story is illustrated a lot more primtively, but with a great sense of design. It would be great to have seen what Sickles would have done with such an assignment in the forties. All this also makes me wonder what was done in the years between that. Maybe Mel Graff or other AP staff artists did stories as well. Well, there's always next year...
The story was printed in several papers, some electing not to use an illustration every day. For some reason I could not get hold of the Dec 6th illustration.
Since writing the commentaries above, I have found that Sigrid Arne did Christmas stories for most years between 1932 and 1931. All of them were illustrated by Hank Barrow, except 1933 (which was by Sickles) and 1932 (which was by someone unknown to me). None of these stories have ever been reprinted, so I might make a yearly feature of them. I also found another Sigrid Arne series with illustrations by Mel Graff, which I might show earlier...
3 comments:
Nice post, but no Sickles: he's Hank Barrow.
Sickles illustrated Sigrid Arne's CHRISTINA THE CHRISTMAS DOLL in December 1933 (Arne penned a Christmas story every year, but with other artists).
You are so right! I uploased the wrong Christmas stoy! I like this one, though. I have shown work by Darrow before and he was quite good. It amazes me here how much his stylistic choices make it look llike the work of modern artist Arthur Adams. I will also ad the Sickles story.
When I saw the original post I was sure it wasn't Sickles, but I had no idea who it was...thanks for publishing both series.
However your text still says "Christmas Doll" dates from 1941, which gave me a start until I read Fortunato's note. This is the most un-Sickles Sickles job I've seen. I'd never seen Darrow before. You're right, his art is very good.
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