Antique Bradshaw Crandell 🎨 "Accent on Youth" 1930s Cigarette Advertising Lithograph NOS Print

Size: 10.75 x 14 inches ~ Unused, never mounted or trimmed. They vary a little one to the next.

🎨 The Print

"Accent on Youth" is a chromolithograph by Bradshaw Crandell, printed by the Gerlach-Barklow Co. of Joliet, Illinois. Along the lower margin it's titled ACCENT ON YOUTH, and Crandell's own script signature sits in the plate at lower right, next to a small printed Gerlach-Barklow credit line. A young woman in a coral top and white shorts sits on a stone sea wall, blue water and clouds behind her, with four cigarette packs floating at her knee — Camel, Lucky Strike, Old Gold and Chesterfield — a wisp of smoke rising off the Lucky Strike pack. That pack is the tell for dating the art: Lucky Strike's pack was printed green until 1942, when the company switched to white for the war effort ("Lucky Strike Green has gone to war"). The same sheet turns up elsewhere with a January 1939 calendar pad still attached - so before 1942 for certain, and most likely 1939 itself.

✍️ Bradshaw Crandell

Crandell was born in Glens Falls, New York in 1896 and died in Madison, Connecticut in 1966; he's buried at Pine View Cemetery in Queensbury, not far from where he started. He got his start in 1921 with a Lorraine hair-net ad for F. W. Woolworth and his first magazine cover for Judge that same year, opened his own studio in 1925, and dropped "John" from his professional name around 1935. He succeeded Harrison Fisher as the cover artist for Cosmopolitan, painting its covers for twelve years running through the thirties and forties, and he painted a run of real Hollywood stars along the way — Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Veronica Lake, Lana Turner among them. The Society of Illustrators inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2006.

🏭 Gerlach-Barklow, Joliet, Illinois

Gerlach-Barklow was organized in 1907 by Theodore R. Gerlach, Edward J. Barklow and K. H. Gerlach, and built its Joliet factory the same year. By 1919 a trade journal was calling it the largest business in the world devoted purely to making art calendars, and by the 1950s it employed more than 1,500 people, sponsored its own sports teams, and threw an annual employee picnic. Businesses bought Gerlach-Barklow calendars by the case to hand out to their own customers, and the roster of artists it hired went well beyond Crandell — Miss America 1927, Lois Delander, even modeled for one of them. The plant closed in 1971. Local legend in Joliet has it that the presses ran through the night in the run-up to calendar season, that the smell of fresh ink was a fixture of the neighborhood for blocks around, and that the pressroom crew got a look at the new season's featured illustration before the salesmen did, because the proof sheets came off the stone first.