Everything about Rea Irvin totally explained
Rea Irvin (
August 26,
1881—
May 28,
1972) was an
American graphic artist. He was the first art editor of the
The New Yorker. He was the creator of the
Eustace Tilley cover portrait and the
New Yorker typeface. He first drew Tilley for the cover of the magazine's first issue on
February 21,
1925. Tilley appeared annually on the magazine's cover every February until 1994.
Early career
Born in
San Francisco, he studied at the
Mark Hopkins Art Institute for six months, started his career as an unpaid cartoonist for
The San Francisco Examiner. He also contributed to the
San Francisco Evening Post. He also worked as an itinerant actor and in 1906 he moved to the
East Coast. In the
1910s he contributed many illustrations to both
Red Book magazine and its sister publication,
Green Book.
Before
World War I, Irvin contributed illustrations regularly to
Life, and rose to the position of art editor. (
Life the humorous weekly, and not to be confused with the more famous magazine of the same name published by
Henry Luce). Irvin also contributed to
Cosmopolitan when it was still a serious literary publication. He illustrated
Wallace Irwin's "Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy" in
Life. He would later incorporate
Japanese imagery in satirical
kakemono for
The New Yorker.
He also created a series of humorous
advertisements for
Murad cigarettes.
He was fired from his position as art editor at
Life in 1924.
Career at The New Yorker
However, Irvin had joined an advisory board to help launch
The New Yorker and then worked on the staff of
The New Yorker as an illustrator and art editor. The magazine's first cover, of a
dandy peering at a
butterfly through a
monocle, was drawn by Irvin. The gentleman on the original cover is referred to as "Eustace Tilley," a character created for
The New Yorker by
Corey Ford.
When he'd taken the job at
The New Yorker, Irvin had assumed that the magazine would fold after a few issues, but his work would appear on 169 covers of
The New Yorker between 1925 and 1958), including, for example, the piece known as
The Unity of the Allied Nations. This appeared on the cover for the July 1,
1944 issue, and depicts the
national personifications of the
Allies (the American Eagle, the Chinese Dragon, the
Russian Bear and the British Lion).
According to
James Thurber, "the invaluable Irvin, artist, ex-actor, wit, and sophisticate about town and country, did more to develop the style and excellence of
The New Yorker's drawings and covers than anyone else, and was the main and shining reason that the magazine's comic art in the first two years was far superior to its humorous prose.”
The New Yorker signature display typeface, used for its nameplate and headlines and the masthead above
The Talk of the Town section, is called "Irvin" or "Irvin type," after him. He also added the
New Yorker's squiggly column rules; these provide a delineation between the text and illustrations.
The Smythes
Irvin also created the
comic strip The Smythes. It ran in the
New York Herald Tribune during the early
1930s.
Last week famed Cartoonist Rea Irvin broke into the "funnies" with a new full-page Sunday series... His title is "The Smythes;" his characters, the conventional father, mother, small son & daughter, Pekinese pup; his theme, the conventional burlesque of U. S. middleclass home life. Sample episode: Mrs. Smythe insists upon buying Pekinese, to utter disgust of Mr. Smythe who snorts, "I don't know what you can see in that mutt." Mrs. Smythe, in desperation, goes to bed. Later, Tootums (the Pekinese) awakes and sneezes. Unable to arouse his wife, Smythe arises, grudgingly walks the floor with Tootums, finally melts, talks baby-talk to Tootums, nurses it back to sleep. Whereupon Mrs. Smythe, awake, triumphantly mocks her husband: "I don't know what you can see in that mutt!" |
Retirement
Six years before his death, Irvin and his wife retired to a home in
Frederiksted,
Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. He died of a stroke there at age 90 on
May 28,
1972.
Further Information
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