Harvey Dunn: A master of illustrating his time

"Coming Off Duty (Camouflage)," 1929. A cover illustration for The American Legion Monthly in January 1930. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Kelly Collection of American Illustration Art.

"Night Raid," a cover illustration for The American Legion Monthly in July 1928. Oil on canvas.

These days, TV, computers and smartphones easily bring the entire world - and part of the universe - to us, but 100 years ago or so, people relied on storytellers, photographers and illustrators to bring in far-away places.

Harvey Dunn was one of those illustrators and the Hunter Museum of American Art is celebrating his work in an exhibit called "Masters of the Golden Age: Harvey Dunn and His Students."

The 80-piece exhibition features works by Dunn, who died in 1952, and also those by some of his more renowned students, including Dean Cornwell, Henry C. Pitz, Mead Schaeffer, John Clymer and Harold von Schmidt.

Dunn's illustrations graced covers and accompanied stories in periodicals like Scribner's, Ladies' Home Journal, Harper's, Collier's Weekly and the Saturday Evening Post, where he did more than 350 covers. His subject matter ranged from battle scenes in World War I to family scenes in Africa to life on the prairie in his home state of South Dakota.

"He brought the world to people," says Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, deputy director and chief curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., which organized the Hunter exhibit.

Some of Dunn's illustrations were stand-alone covers and some accompanied feature-length stories, she adds.

"These were long-form, like short novellas," she says.

In the early part of the 20th century, when Dunn was doing most of his work, it was the job of illustrators to give readers a visual image of the person, location or the overarching theme of the subject matter.

"The pieces are representations of the way that Americans saw their lives at that time and the way they sort of envisioned their lives," said Cara McGowan, director of marketing and communications at the Hunter.

The collection also features some of Dunn's large oil-on-canvas paintings. They range in size from 2-by-3 feet to 4-by-5 feet. Illustrators of the day were aware of the constrictions of having their works reproduced on a magazine cover and had to consider such elements as sharpness and color reproduction.

"Illustrators knew they had about three seconds to get the reader's attention and decide if they would buy the magazine," Plunkett says.

Dunn was very fast and very prolific in his work, reportedly having painted 55 pieces in 11 months during one stretch.

"He was also a celebrity of his day. People knew his work," Plunkett says.

Contact Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.