EARL MACPHERSON

Art Brokerage Artist and illustrator Earl MacPherson was born in Oklahoma in 1910 on his grandfather's farm and it was said that his father gave a pig to the doctor as a payment. After finishing high school he went to Los Angeles and studied at the Chouinard School of Art. In 1929 he began to work at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu painting portraits for rich guests. By 1939 he opened his own studio in Hollywood and started to paint portraits for the Earl Carroll Girls. In 1941 he painted a pin-up illustration for the Shaw-Barton Calendar Company and it would become so successful that Lucky Strike cigarettes wanted to reproduce it for its 1942 calendar. Early Brown & Bigelow was interested on his work and in 1942 the company hired MacPherson who became very famous thanks to his Artist's Sketch Pad in which he painted a central pin-up figure surrounded by some pencil delineations that showed the same girl in different poses. In 1945 he began working again for Shaw-Barton because he had a better wage and another different labour opportunities there. In 1951 MacPherson was ill with polio and his assistant Jerry Thompson who signed as T.N. Thompson went on with his work reproducing his original style with success. In 1954 he wrote an illustrated book entitled "Pin Up Art: How to Draw and Paint Beautiful Girls" which was published by the Waiter Foster Company. By 1960 Macpherson moved to Tahiti and during this period he began to be known as a "Western" artist. He died in 1993 at the age of 83.