Frances Tipton Hunter (1896-1957) (after)
Eveready Flashlight and Battery Company (client)
“The difference between Day and Night”
American: c. 1930s
Serial number lower right: F-93450
30 x 20.25 inches, overall
29 x 19.25 inches, image
Sold, please inquire as to the availability of similar items.
Eveready Advertising Poster
After Frances Tipton Hunter
After Frances Tipton Hunter
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Large advertising poster for the Eveready Flashlight and Battery Company, probably issued for posting in department or hardware stores. A man shines a flashlight on a terrestrial globe, instructing his grandchildren how the rays of the sun create day and night on the earth. Eveready also used this image in magazine print ads, one located from 1935. In the 1920s and 1930s, the company commissioned a number of illustrations advertising flashlights and batteries for magazines, Eveready catalogs, trade magazines, calendars and posters. Frances Tipton Hunter created a number of them, generally featuring a child, a pet and an Eveready flashlight. One of the ads, showing a girl shining her flashlight on a litter of nine kittens, became so popular that the company sold 70,000 reproductions “suitable for framing” at ten cents apiece. That work also was the origin of Eveready’s “cat with nine lives” symbol.
Frances Tipton Hunter was an American magazine illustrator specializing in gently humorous and endearing genre pictures of children, in a style related to the Americana of Norman Rockwell. She was active from the 1920s to the late 1950s. Born in Pennsylvania, she was orphaned at age 6 and raised by relatives in Williamsport. As a young woman she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and graduated from the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts. Later she became a member of the Society of Illustrators and the Artists Guild. Tipton illustrated for all the major magazines of the era and produced artwork for advertising, catalogs, calendars, greeting cards and posters. She drew paper dolls for Woman’s Home Companion in the 1920s and continued to make them at least into the 1940s; two collections were reissued by Dover Publications in 1988-89. She also produced covers for magazines such as Collier’s and Country Home as well as at least 18 covers for the Saturday Evening Post between 1936 and 1941. She published a children’s book, The Frances Tipton Hunter Picture Book, with verses and stories by Marjorie Barrows (1935). She left much of her artwork to the Lycoming County Historical Museum and the James V. Brown Library in Williamsport; according to the library’s web site “her original posters and advertisements are rare.”
References:
Falk, Peter Hastings, ed. Who Was Who in American Art. Madison, Connecticut: Sound View Press, 1985. p. 300.
“Library Announces Call for Entries for Tipton Hunter Art Award.” James V. Brown Library. 12 March 2003. http://www.jvbrown.edu/pressrm_mar03.html (21 September 2004).
“Frances T. Hunter (Saturday Evening Post covers).” Curtis Publishing. 2003. http://www.curtispublishing.com/other-artists/html/Hunter.html (21 September 2004).
“History of Flashlights.” Energizer. http://www.energizer.com/learning/historyofflashlights.asp (21 September 2004).
Johnson, Judy M. “History of Paper Dolls” from The Doll Sourcebook. 1999. Original Paper Doll Artist Guild. http://www.opdag.com/History.html (21 September 2004).