Earl MacPherson
- From "The Great American Pin-up"
In 1939, Earl MacPherson was an aspiring climber artist with a studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California. One night the phone rang with an invitation from Charlie would, the president Brown and Bigelow to meet him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Impressed with the artist's work, Ward invited him to join the firm's St. Paul headquarters. After some time spent "hanging around", observing and learning, MacPherson officially joined the staff in 1942.
MacPherson married his first model at Brown and Bigelow, and went on to create a unique pinup calendar it would become the standard for the industry. First published in 1943, his "Artist Sketchpad" became a million-dollar seller. Each page of the 12 page calendar, found at the top of the spiral binder, featured a primary pinup figure surrounded by pencil sketches showing the same model in various poses relating to the central image.
Before going to Brown and Bigelow, MacPherson had painted a very famous pinup image for the Shaw-Barton Calendar company. The best-selling image in the company's 1941 "Going Places" was so popular that the Lucky Strike cigarette company asked to reproduce it in their 1942 calendar with the caption "Lucky Strike Green Goes to War".
MacPherson was born on ✦August 3, 1910, in Oklahoma. He moved to Los Angeles after high school, got a job painting movie posters for downtown theater, and took it in class art classes at the Chouinard School of Art. In 1929 he set up shop at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, painting portraits of wealthy guests. MacPherson's smashing success with the "Artist Sketchpad" was followed by another triumph. His two-deck set of playing cards for Brown and Bigelow called "Win, Lose or Draw" received a total of 688,000 orders in four months. His diary-style calendar, "Something to Remember" was his last success before he went off to war in 1944. Discharged in 1946, after teaching decoy recognition to Navy pilots, he settled on a 4-acre ranch in Del Mar, California. He also hooked up once again Shaw-Barton and began the first of nine consecutive years of MacPherson sketchbook calendars for them. In 1954 Shaw-Barton published a book called "Hunting with MacPherson; a parody of pinup girls dressed as various hunting birds. The same year, the artist wrote and designed the best-selling "how-to book" entitled "Pinup" for the Walter Foster company. 1951, MacPherson was stricken with polio and his assistant Terry Thompson took over the sketchbook calendar series under the name T. N. Thompson. 1950s MacPherson had his own television show in Arizona, about 1960, he moved to Tahiti and traveled widely in the South Pacific.
He died in †December 1993
One of the most successful and imitated of pin-up artists, MacPherson (born in Oklahoma in 1910) originated the famous "Artist's Sketchbook" series for Brown & Bigelow, in which a central, finished figure is augmented by preliminary-style side sketches. World War 2 interrupted his B & B service, and K.O. Munson became the first of his many successors. After the war, Mac signed with Shaw-Barton for a similar successful series.
"Winter Scene," circa 1950, is, typically, a pastel, and the cartoony snowman pencil sketch. Mac worked with live models, and men's magazine spreads of him painting lovely nudes, scattered about his modernistic Southern California studio, added to his legend.
The versatile MacPherson also had a considerable reputation as a Western artist. In addition, he had begun a new series of signed limited edition pin-up prints for Stabur Graphics.
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