Charles Allan Gilbert

Charles Allan Gilbert ( born September 9, 1873 in Hartford, Connecticut, † 20 April 1929 in New York City ) was an American painter, printmaker and illustrator of the Art Nouveau.

Life

Little is known about Charles Allan Gilbert's life. He was the youngest son of Charles Edwin Gilbert and Virginia Ewing Crane Gilbert and had two brothers: Albert Waldron Gilbert and Edwin Randolph Gilbert. Gilbert was bedridden as a child and began to practice as a pastime in drawing and sketching. At the age of 16, he took painting lessons with Charles Noel Flagg ( 1848-1916 ), founder of the Art Students League in Connecticut. From 1892-94 Gilbert studied at the Art Students League of New York, followed by the Académie Julian in Paris, where he became a student at Jules Laurens and Jean -Joseph Benjamin -Constant. After only a year he returned to New York to commercialize his art; he opened his own studio and began working as a commercial artist and illustrator. From 1902 he delivered numerous articles for Life Magazine, in which his most famous work, All is Vanity, was released. His satirical drawings he sometimes enriched with short self-written sketches and polemical and ironic lyrics, which have enjoyed in but humorous pamphlets, comic papers and satire magazines of that time very popular. Besides, he continued to pursue his free artistic ambitions and academic painted landscapes and figurative images of women, but the less attention. During the First World War Gilbert boosted his reputation with Camouflagebemalungen of military equipment and the design of advertising posters for war bonds.

Charles Allan Gilbert died a wealthy man on 20 April 1929 at age 55 from pneumonia. In his honor was held on Broadway, a memorial service in Campbell 's Funeral Church. Gilbert was buried in his birthplace of Hartford in Connecticut.

All is Vanity

All is Vanity ( "All is Vanity " ), the morbid vanitas portrait of a young woman in front of an apparent dressing table in the form of a skull, which Gilbert had already painted at age 18, was first published in 1902 Life Magazine. The illustration is one of the most famous picture puzzles; it has been reproduced and copied countless times and found up to the present use. A known replication shows the cover of the album released in 1993 Retroactive the English hard rock band Def Leppard.

The 26 West Eighth Street in which was Gilbert's studio, was one of the early 20th century to the most prestigious addresses in the emerging New York art and advertising world. The building was home to, among others, the studios of other known illustrators like Edwin Austin Abbey Francis Davis Millet or; Millet was the misfortune of the RMS Titanic lost their lives.

Works

Other well-known works of CA Gilbert are Whittington Family, Women of fiction, The Honeymoon, A Portfolio of Heads, Heads Cameo, Collection of Heads in Color, Separate Drawings in Color, A Message from Mars and In Beauty 's Realm.