American Illustrator. 1880-1927.

Creator of “the fadeaway girl,” seller of cars to women (among many other things, including hosiery and tea service), and a crackerjack pictorial designer, Coles Phillips is among the most memorable illustrators of the first two-plus decades of the twentieth century—a crowded field, that. His life was relatively brief; he suffered from kidney disease and was effectively finished in 1924, succumbing in 1927. But he had a remarkable run from the late “aughts” into the twenties. For three years a student at my alma mater, Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, Phillips is mentioned as a member of the class of 1905, though he seems not to have graduated. A 2019 Kenyon alumni article reports that he was known by his Gambier pals as “Psi.” A funny detail. He signed his work “C. Coles Phillips” early in his career, later dropping the “C.” on the front end after 1911. The illustrations shown in this post are cited by how he signed that particular project.

Phillips produced a great deal of advertising work, and came to be closely associated with Life Magazine, for whom he produced many covers (though one of my very favorite is a Good Housekeeping cover from 1914). These illustrations make use of his signature approach: Typically a woman is placed against a colored field which matches her costume. The linework is omitted, leaving an ensemble of shapes which create a fluctuating relationship between figure and field. To be more precise, edge is substituted for line as a means of shape definition. And certain edges are effectively obscured by shared color. The viewer’s eyes and brain collaborate to fill in her figure, which is only implied.

Phillips’s ad work included major projects with Oneida Community Plate, Willys-Overland Motors, Holeproof Hosiery, Vitralite Enamel, and plenty more.

C. Coles Phillips, Hezekiah, the frontispiece from The Siege of the Seven Suitors, by Meredith Nichols, 1910. — C. Coles Phillips, *Hezekiah*, the frontispiece from *The Siege of the Seven Suitors*, by Meredith Nichols, 1910.

I have seen very little of his book work, but he is reputed to have done plenty of it. Only last year I found a volume in an antique mall stall with a Phillips frontispiece, a delightful find. The Siege of the Seven Suitors, from 1910. Illustration above.

I wrote about Phillips’s The Magic Hour, a picture for Oneida Community Plate, in Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice (2018).

Coles Phillips, The Magic Hour, 1924. The painting (for an Oneida Community Plate advertisement) is in the Kelly Collection of American Illustration. — Coles Phillips, *The Magic Hour*, 1924. The painting (for an Oneida Community Plate advertisement) is in the Kelly Collection of American Illustration.

“A woman sits in a black Windsor chair in a curious attitude, a mixture of repose and attentiveness, her legs crossed. Her left arm rests on the back rim of the chair; her hand is balanced languidly, fingertips on armrest. Her right elbow is tucked, resting on the opposite armrest, forearm down, her fingers supporting a bright white coffee cup like a milkweed blossom. She looks to her left. The forms are manifested by edges, not lines; the distinctions between figure and ground collapse into a yellow-gold field. The picture is dominated by said flat color, which implicitly contains a late-afternoon interior and an identically colored dress that disappears as if camouflaged. The dissolution of the figure into the field is Dionysian, a collapse of distinctions—as “the slave emerges as a freedman,” in the words of Nietzsche. Yet the reliance on value structure and the analytical precision of the forms argues for an Apollonian mindset. The evanescent shimmer of the moment, underscored by the title, pushes back, even as the somber black chair and the two spindly pedestal tables enforce their own Doric order of domesticity. The Magic Hour is warm and cool, insubstantial but rigid, fleeting yet permanent.”

Biographical stuff below.

The Norman Rockwell Museum Illustration History site provides the following (edited) sketch. “Clarence Coles Phillips, better known as Coles Phillips, drew his way through a childhood devoid of formal art education. Phillips was unproductive when he worked as a clerk at the American Radiator Company and sketched on the job. [His Kenyon years followed; he left Ohio] …to pursue a career in illustration in New York City, where he again worked for American Radiator. He was fired after a short tenure when the president of the company viewed a vulgar drawing Phillips had made of him.

Phillips sought formal training by night at the Chase School of Art and the Free School. He endured a stint working at an illustration assembly line where several men painted different body parts on a single figure; he quit in disgust after just eight weeks. Phillips then landed a job at an advertising agency where he worked as a staff artist, and was quickly promoted to artist-client liaison—a higher-status job that prevented him from making his own drawings. Even after leaving the agency and starting his own in 1906, he was not painting as often as he wanted. Phillips gave up the agency the following year and with enough money for thirty days of food and rent, he started to work in earnest, drawing frantically day and night.

Just as his money ran out and his landlord became restive, Phillips presented a drawing to the editor of Life magazine, and the editor approved. Phillips was paid for his work and illustrated for Life frequently from then on. His first Life cover appeared in early 1908. In May 1908, also on a Life cover, he pioneered what came to be his signature design—a graphic human figure with a detailed face, hands, and feet, and with clothing in the same shade as the background. This design, called “The Fadeaway Girl” took the illustration world by storm, and Phillips’ work soon appeared on books, calendars, postcards sold internationally, and a profusion of other covers for Life. Although he often created illustrations without the fade-away effect, the style was his unmistakable hallmark throughout his career.”