In his heyday between the two World Wars, Joseph Francis Kernan (1878-1958) made art that glowed from the covers and pages of virtually every popular American publication, not to mention hundreds of advertisements, calendars and other promotions. His 1932 oil on canvas, College Football, painted for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post that same year, is considered by some to be the inspiration behind the most iconic trophy in college sports, the Heisman, sculpted by Frank Eliscu two years later.
Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, J.F. Kernan reportedly was an uncommon team sports athlete who loved the outdoors. He paid his art school tuition by playing professional baseball, stayed on at Boston's Pape School of Art for two years, teaching, then headed for New York City to further his illustrator's career.
One quotation comes up again and again in online research on Kernan, his explanation for his particular story-telling angle. Kernan said his beat was "the human side of outdoor sports, hunting, fishing, and dogs." Happily for me, when Kernan painted a dog, that dog was most likely to be an English setter.
Critics tout Kernan's sense of humor in his work. He wasn't above playing to convention, the standard gag featured on the covers of sporting magazines everywhere being the hunter surprised by his quarry.
Kernan was the pro's pro of commercial illustrators, forever playing to the crowd. In selling magazines, beer, tires, or calendar art (like the first one below, published by the venerable Goes Lithographing Company, and entitled "Seven New Playmates"), what could have broader appeal than a litter of English setter puppies?
A recurring motif in Kernan's puppy portraits can be seen in the second Saturday Evening Post cover of this blog post, as one or more of the parents is lead away from the litter, supposedly headed for a day afield.
In Kernan's world (and mine), all English setter breeders worth painting are hunters. They enjoy spending time with the litter, constantly weighing merits of the youngsters against the day when Pup goes into the game fields and shows that she's a chip off the ol' block...and a natural for hawking Grain Belt beer!
There may not be a hoarier upland cliche than The Dilemma of the Posted Covert, a quandary for Dog and Gun that Kernan believes can sometimes be solved with a good will offering.
The proferred cigar painting above became a cover for Capper's Farmer which, since 1893, has been printing "Practical Advice For The Homemade Life" in Canada and the US. Capper's Farmer is still in publication (https://www.cappersfarmer.com/ ).
Certainly one of the hallmarks of Kernan's portrayal of English setters is his depiction of them in our lives, and not just during hunting season. For example, those who may occasionally or even habitually commit fishing, will appreciate the English setter visualizing a smokey streamside brag about "the big one that got away."
Maybe more than anything, though, what makes Kernan's work endearing to a gun dog aficionado is the affection apparent in each scene. His men (and I could find no women painted into Kernan's upland world) love their dogs, and vice versa.
Kernan's portfolio includes several stock examples of the "lacing up the boots in front of the psyched and pleading gun dog" genre. This was the only one that depicted a pointer. Because it is of the old style, heavily marked, head-full-of-brains-not-wind pointer, I felt deputized to sneak it into a setter blog.
Part of the humor in Kernan's illustrations rests in the dogs' expressions. In this Outdoor Life cover, the "Now what?" look on that setter's face says it all.
My favorite model for Kernan is the white mustachioed, dapper fellow who appears in numerous paintings. I've dubbed him "The Gent," and he exudes everything that is my imaginary New England grouse gunner from another time, a guy who could've been a charter member of Corey Ford's Lower Forty Hunting, Shooting, and Inside Straight Club.
The Gent is dapper in his double-knotted Bean boots, battered fedora, and the necktie he always wore into his coverts. I suspect his hunting coat reeks of pipe tobacco, his breath tart from the nip of hard cider taken for medicinal purposes back at his shooting brake, his team of horses drowsing in the October sun, the leg o' mutton case for his Ithaca or Parker double tucked under the buggy seat.
He's an easy character for my own made-up tales around Kernan's art. The painting below is my current favorite.
Maybe that's his grandson, home on leave from the service. The young man has killed a ruffed grouse over The Gent's setter; as the old man admires the bird, he's thinking of other grouse on other days when he was the young man, palming a soft-mouthed retrieve from the grand sire of the dog hunting with them here.
He handles that bird, admires that bird, in a way that says every ruffed grouse in hand is a wonder, a great good gift that, for him, can come only one way - from his coverts, his worn double shotgun, and an English setter bred to work and look and behave just so.
Sure it's maudlin. But that's the popular illustrator's hole card, to depict us they way we fancy ourselves, the way we wish we were. I am far closer to the Gent than to the ramrod-straight, ruddy faced younger fellow and maybe that's the bottom line of my love of Kernan's art: a yearning for a simpler time of sportsmanlike mores, of grouse and woodcock-rich coverts bare of bootprints and carelessly discarded shell casings, of fast, keen, feather-tailed English setters working for the Gun without bells, beepers or Elon Muskian GPS antennae.
More than anything else, Kernan's art speaks to me in its depiction of devotion to and from the dog. The fact that he painted setters reminiscent of the Firelight dogs I love most only seals the deal. I may never be more than a Gent wannabe, but, like my imagined version of him, I by gadfrey know what I like.
*** I so badly wanted the Corey Ford piece touted on Kernan's baseball player magazine cover to be an upland hunting story. Instead it was a long piece of sappy (even for Corey) romantic fiction. Sigh. More promising was an article entitled "Dogs In A Big Way," featuring a full page head study of two English setters by the ubiquitous Lynn Bogue Hunt. Sadly, the article was about a wire-haired terrier fancier's trials and tribulations in the show ring, grooming shed, and in a trans-Atlantic search for a suitable replacement for the animal repeatedly referred to as "the dog Dick." Arg.
Anyway, here's the full page Hunt painting from The Saturday Evening Post, 5/28/1932. I had never seen it before researching this blog:
%20JF%20Kernan.jpg)
***(see at bottom)
No comments:
Post a Comment