\"Uncle Sam\" Elbert McGran Jackson COVER (Saturday Evening Post, May 12, 1923) For Sale

\"Uncle Sam\" COVER, Saturday Evening Post (May 12, 1923, Volume 195, Number 46). Cover ONLY!
Artist: Elbert McGran Jackson
Image: Full-color rendering of a Patriotic \"Uncle Sam,\" wearing red and white striped pants and star-spangled morning coat with tails, trying on a straw boater...in keeping with the Spring Season! Uncle Sam\'s iconic top hat and cane are laid to his side.
Theme: United States; Patriotism; Home Front; Inter-war era; Military; Peacetime (Isolationism?)
Dimensions: 9 5/8\" x 13 1/2\"
Condition: Near Mint+++ no edge tears, no waterstains, no address label, colors are still vivid, very slight toning along the left edge. The Cover has been photographed inside a Mylar sleeve (from which it can be slid out), hence there are some slight reflections!
*****
Elbert McGran (E.M.) Jackson

Elbert McGran Jackson, or E.M. Jackson as he signed his artwork, became famous for his cover art on the Saturday Evening Post. He was born in Augusta in 1896 and grew up on the 900 block of Greene Street. He graduated from Richmond Academy in 1912 and from Georgia School of Technology in 1916 with honors in architecture. He was one of the principal artists for The Saturday Evening Post and Country Gentleman magazines. His first work in publishing pictures was in making layouts for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine.

In 1917, he secured a position in an architect\'s office in New York, but his deep love of pictures and color drew him towards nightly visits to the Beaux Arts Institute on Seventy-sixth Street, where he studied painting, drawing, anatomy, and sculpture. He soon began to feel confident about his craft and chose to switch professions. After all, he was a visual artist. At twenty-two, he painted a picture of a man smoking a pipe, the blissful expression on the subject\'s face being seen through the curling smoke. This picture was bought by a large tobacco company, which ordered seven more to be used in a series.

Although questioning whether this was a one-time success or something he could count on as a career, he decided to burn his bridges and take the risk. He resigned from his architecture job, rented a studio, and engaged Allen Simpson, the gentleman with the soulful smoke, to continue posing. \"My pockets were pretty nearly empty,\" he confessed, \"but my hopes were high. There I was launched, or thought I was, in commercial art.\"

He immediately made friends with the well-known, established illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, who became something of a mentor. Mr. Flagg once remarked that Mr. Jackson\'s early records read like a \"Horatio Alger story.\"

His first magazine cover appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in January 1921. It depicted a bellhop delivering an old shoe on a silver tray to a honeymoon couple in a hotel. The original of this picture now hangs in the main office of the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia.

Another cover, for Valentine’s Day 1928, showed a young couple riding in a carriage looking out the back window and Cupid riding in attendance. Miss Constance Wright, daughter of Boykin Wright Sr. of Augusta, married Elbert Jackson in 1927; she posed for the Valentine\'s Day cover in 1928.

An artistic specialty of Jackson’s was painting women in poses that made them appear seductive and glamorous with architecturally authentic backgrounds. His technique was spontaneous as he painted from posed models. In addition to magazine covers, he illustrated manuscripts involving romance and high society. However, he also illustrated for a wide variety of genres, including murder mysteries and masculine adventure.

By the end of the 1920s, he had painted thirty-nine Saturday Evening Post covers. He went on to make a total of fifty-eight covers for the Curtis Publishing Company, forty-eight for the Saturday Evening Post and ten for Country Gentleman. Curtis referred to Mr. Jackson as one of their principal illustrators. His cover illustrations also appeared in the Ladies Home Journal, Colliers, McCall’s, and many other magazines. In addition, he provided illustrations for stories in books and magazines by such authors as Fannie Hurst, Kathleen Norris, Louis Bromfield, Rex Beach, Faith Baldwin, Pearl Buck, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Edna Ferber, Harold Bell Wright, and Robert W. Chambers.

As tastes and technology changed, hand painted illustration art all but disappeared, replaced in large part by photography. This change pushed Mr. Jackson in new directions. In his later years, he designed and produced custom fabrics for New York interior decorators. He had an office and showroom on 57th Street in New York.

He also designed memorials. Many of the tombstones in Magnolia Cemetery in Augusta were designed by Mr. Jackson. Perhaps the most notable is the bronze figure of Paul Hamilton Hayne, the Augusta poet.

Mr. Jackson died in 1963 at the age of 66 and was buried in Summerville Cemetery in National WWI Museum and Memorial

Uncle Sam: We Want You

Clad in his \"American flag suit,\"Uncle Sam has long been popular as the personification of the United States. His federally-accepted origins date all the way back to the War of 1812, when a man named Samuel Wilson prepared provisions for soldiers and marked them with the label “U.S.” He meant it to stand for “United States,” but that wasn’t yet a popular abbreviation, so soldiers said the provisions came from “UncleSam.”

While this origin story has faded from public knowledge, Uncle Sam went on to become an instantly recognizable figure. He has appeared in posters and political cartoons as far back as 1852. During the American Civil War, his popularity began to grow, escalating even more through the late 1800s and into the pre-WWIyears.

The most famous depiction comes from a 1917 WWIposter:

This image of Uncle Sam pointing directly at the viewer rolled off the printing presses over four million times from 1917 through 1918, making it synonymous with patriotic duty. Artist James Montgomery Flagg created it, commissioned by the Committee for Public Information(CPI).

As the story goes, Flagg had a model scheduled to sit for the painting, but the model never arrived, so he used his own reflection for the now iconic image. For the pose, he took inspiration from a 1914 British poster featuring Lord Kitchener pointing at the viewer and calling on them to join thearmy.

The Uncle Sam poster is a direct call to action: “We Want You!” to enlist in order to, as Woodrow Wilson declared to U.S. Congress, “Make the World Safe forDemocracy.” Decades later, World War II propagandists turned to the same image to call for enlistment after the United States declared war against Japan in1941.

Portrayals of Uncle Sam have varied greatly since the beginning. Authors, artists and organizations of radically different ideals have all used Uncle Sam to express theirbeliefs.