Fave Photo Of The Day: Otto Soglow
A link to this photo turned up in my inbox this morning. I’ve seen the photo before over the years, and have always slightly puzzled over it. The puzzling part is where Mr. Soglow is sitting at his drawing board. We’re all used to photos of cartoonists sitting at their drawing boards, not beside their drawing boards, like this one of Whitney Darrow, Jr.:
The artist at their drawing board has been used a long long time (Google “cartoonist at drawing board”). Rheingold Beer even figured out a (somewhat) clever way to sell their beer using the image. Here’s Peter Arno:
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The A-Zs of the above three artists (with a bonus photo of Soglow at the drawing board in what looks to be the same room as the above Soglow photo):
Otto Soglow Born, Yorkville, NY, December 23, 1900. Died in NYC, April 1975. New Yorker work: 1925 -1974.Key collections: Pretty Pictures ( Farrar & Rinehart, 1931) and for fans of Soglow’s Little King; The Little King (Farrar & Rinehart, 1933) and The Little King ( John Martin’s House, Inc., 1945). The latter Little King is an illustrated storybook. Cartoon Monarch / Otto Soglow & The Little King (IDW, 2012) is an excellent compendium.
Whitney Darrow, Jr. Born August 22, 1909, Princeton, NJ. Died August, 1999, Burlington, Vermont. New Yorker work: 1933 -1982. Quote (Darrow writing of himself in the third person): …in 1931 he moved to New York City, undecided between law school and doing cartoons as a profession. The fact that the [New Yorker’s] magazine offices were only a few blocks away decided him…” (Quote from catalogue, Meet the Artist, 1943)
Peter Arno Born Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr., January 8, 1904, New York City. Died February 22, 1968, Port Chester, NY. New Yorker work: 1925 -1968. Key collection: Ladies & Gentlemen (Simon & Schuster, 1951) The Foreword is by Arno. For far more on Arno please check out my biography of him, Peter Arno: The Mad Mad World of The New Yorker’s Greatest Cartoonist (Regan Arts, 2016).
The two Soglow images are from the same photo shoot showing him in the same studio posing with the same drawing. In one he wears a jacket and tie probably over the same short-sleeved shirt.