In the first three decades of the twentieth century, no American illustrator laid down pigment and pattern more stylishly or effectively than did Joseph Christian Leyendecker, whose paintings are currently on display in Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity, at the New-York Historical Society. All the paintings in the N-YHS exhibition are on loan from the National Museum of American Illustration.

(Full parenthetical disclosure. I’m longtime friends with the founders of the National Museum of American Illustration, Judy Goffman Cutler and Laurence S. Cutler. When Judy first advertised an interest in collecting illustration in the early 1970s, my father contacted her and suggested she add Leyendecker to her wish list. According to Judy, she’d never heard of Leyendecker before, so I could make the slightly convoluted claim that the current exhibition wouldn’t have happened without my father’s input some fifty years ago. At the time, many original oil paintings by Leyendecker hung in our house, including a rather spectacular Saturday Evening Post cover that was installed above my childhood bed. I copied one of his paintings and briefly emulated his signature.)

Leyendecker was born in Montabour, Germany in 1874, and moved to Chicago in 1882. He studied drawing and anatomy at the Art Institute with John Vanderpoel, then he and his brother went to Paris in 1895 to study at the Académie Julian. Leyendecker returned to Chicago in 1897 and enjoyed success as an illustrator before moving to New York in 1902. His output was prolific: Leyendecker painted 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post—one more than his protégé Norman Rockwell—and his illustrations for Arrow detachable shirt collars and Kuppenheimer clothing created the defining male fashion imagery of the era. In 1915, he moved with his brother and sister to an estate in New Rochelle. In 1903, Leyendecker met Charles Beach, who became his favorite model, business manager and companion until his death in 1951.

Beach is central to Leyendecker’s biography. As his agent, he is credited with negotiating lucrative terms with the Post and other magazines. Rockwell described him as “tall, powerfully built, and extraordinarily handsome—looked like an athlete from one of the Ivy League colleges. He spoke with a clipped British accent and was always beautifully dressed. His manners were polished and impeccable…” He was the ideal model for Leyendecker’s suave prototype. Rockwell also seems to have resented Beach, and considered him a parasitic presence, the gatekeeper of Leyendecker’s privacy. It is this privacy that makes Under Cover, and all biographical content about Leyendecker, speculative in nature. The challenges this entails are well summarized by Michael J. Murphy, who wrote last year in the Johns Hopkins University Press:

The disjunction between the large quantity of known Leyendecker images and the scarcity of information about their creator is both frustrating and freeing…. much of the scholarly and popular writing on Leyendecker attempts to draw connections between the content of his work and the poorly documented aspects of his personal life. Most often, this takes the form of attributing its “homoeroticism” to Leyendecker’s likely homosexuality, often characterized as tragic, troubled, or closeted.

Given his sense of discretion, Under Cover does as well as could be expected in connecting Leyendecker’s imagery to urban gay culture in the early twentieth century, without stereotyping the artist or bestowing upon him the unintended role of advocacy. The suspected coding in these illustrations was by definition subliminal, though plain enough to delight a Freudian—in With Collie, a woman pets a dog while two men holding golf bags ignore her and stare at each other. If these images were meant to signal, they would have first been vetted by the advertisers, who would presumably have nixed a campaign rather than alienate their mainstream audience. And the mainstream ate it up. The Arrow Collar Man was an enormously popular sex symbol who generated an avalanche of fan mail and marriage proposals from women. Cole Porter mentioned him in song and he was obliquely referenced in The Great Gatsby. The exhibition’s wall notes offer other cultural contexts, including efforts by German Jewish clothiers to brand their products as American and Christian. Leyendecker’s sartorial Adonis was the answer.

When I was a child, Leyendecker’s Saturday Evening Post cover of a seated football player hung over my bed. The possibility of a homoerotic subtext escaped me, but I am less certain that the figure’s golden masculinity wasn’t intimidating to a skinny Jewish kid. Be that as it may, I had the opportunity to study Leyendecker’s work and methods at great length, and what the Cutlers have called “the exaggerated, quick brushstroke effect known as pochet, or crosshatched strokes with oil paint.” This stylized handling of paint is pronounced in the flat white backgrounds of many of his illustrations, like Couple in Boat and Men Seated on Couch. Typical of Leyendecker’s mature work is the poster effect of the figures, who exist (both literally and figuratively) primarily as two-dimensional presences. The fashion plates on the couch, beautiful and vapid, cut sharp, arresting patterns. Where Leyendecker truly excels is in the patterns within patterns, especially of fabrics. The model who casually holds a red book wears a shirt that accentuates his powerful torso; the shirt, in turn, is composed of calculated brush strokes, each laid down with liquid pigment that describes the movement of crisp material, upon which are overlaid striking black pinstripes. It is a tour de force of painted material, meant to sell material.

No American painter other than Sargent so successfully equated clothing with leisure culture, though Leyendecker was creating an image not for the elite, but for mass consumption. The white fabric worn by the Couple in Boat, assembled from networks of strokes that sculpt the drapery with sensual precision, nearly distracts us from the expertise in the painting of hands, skin and hair. In the Post cover that shows a man dressing for Easter—another painting that once hung in our home—the figure is reduced to a slick, pretty mannequin. The painting’s strengths lie elsewhere, in the astonishingly well crafted still life objects of mirror frame, daffodils, gloves, top hat and marble counter. In the Football Player (not in show), one finds stylizations characteristic of Leyendecker’s mature work: the figure is illuminated by two light sources, there is a fondness for sculptural, curled forms (the forelock of hair and ornamental scroll at the model’s feet) and cast shadows are punctuated by serrated lights. Paint is always applied without apparent corrections; any uncertainties were worked through in preliminary studies.

Rockwell was enthralled. Recalling his admiration of Leyendecker when he was a young illustrator, he later wrote:

My father once asked me whose work I preferred, Rockwell’s or Leyendecker’s. We both decided on the latter, owing to his gifts of design and pure paint application. By adolescence my respect was grudging. Given how fully I absorbed his work before I was old enough to realize it, I’d earned the privilege of a critical posture. Familiarity bred contempt for the commercial demands that bent art from something personal to the selling of shirts and Americana. For my father, who came of age in the 1930s, Leyendecker’s painting would have represented formative images from his youth. Owning the original paintings that he’d first seen on magazine covers must have fulfilled a tremendous nostalgic pleasure.

Absent from the N-YHS show is the corpus of Leyendecker’s illustration that falls outside the influential fashion advertisements—the paintings for cereal, the New Year’s babies, and Santa Clauses, the cartoon-like images of daily life and tributes to American heroes. At home, we got to see pretty much all of it, from Post covers to a figure study that was likely painted when Leyendecker was a student in Paris. These showed his scope as a painter and the evolution of his academic training, slicked up and sharpened to create alluring surfaces. Reconsidering his painting now, Leyendecker’s technical aptitude looks refreshing when compared to the the volumes of sober and diligent realism being produced today. Whatever criticisms one may dispense, Leyendecker was both highly accomplished and original.

Under Cover endeavors to present a window into a suppressed culture. It is unlikely that this was Leyendecker’s intent; he was a consummate professional, by nature disinclined to reveal his personal preferences. For the unfamiliar visitor, the current exhibition offers an introduction to his genius as an illustrator. A more comprehensive accounting awaits.

Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity is on view at the New-York Historical Society through August 13.