Elbert McGran Jackson, (Untitled) a Scandalous Tea With a Stranger in Leiderstein

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In the depths of the Great Depression, American women sought escape from their worries. For 25¢,“Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan” magazine delivered. … Read more In the depths of the Great Depression, American women sought escape from their worries. For 25¢,“Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan” magazine delivered. The magazine published fiction, from short stories to full-length novels, and commissioned evocative illustrations to accompany these stories, designed to capture their most exciting moments.
What could be more escapist than reading of the plight of a beautiful princess (one from America, no less) caught in an innocent mistake guaranteed to lead to a disastrous international crisis? Truly, things could be worse than one’s own circumstances.
The artist of this work, Elbert McGran Jackson (1896-1962) was born in Augusta, Georgia, and studied drawing from childhood. He completed his degree in architecture at Georgia Tech, something that served him well as he pursued his passion for illustration after hours. Later he moved to New York and built a successful career with his work published extensively in “Cosmopolitan “and “The Saturday Evening Post.”
This 1935 piece was painted to accompany “The Princess from America” by Royal Brown. It spectacularly displays Jackson’s dual specialties of painting high society women at their most seductive and glamorous, while placing them in architecturally authentic settings. (Thank you, Georgia Tech.) The caption read “’By taking tea with a stranger,' thundered the duke, 'Your Highness has involved Leiderstein in scandal!'" thus effectively inciting a short leap of the imagination to where a girl can forget about the laundry. See less