Al Parker - Gifted Gallery
- Lilium
- Aug 27
- 2 min read
Alfred "Al" Charles Parker, born 1906, was an American artist and illustrator who specialised in magazine illustrations.
Parker's display of talent as a teenager led his grandfather, a Mississippi River Pilot, to pay for Al's first year in Washington University's School of Fine Arts in St. Louis, Missouri in 1922. He also played saxophone in a jazz band on a river boat to earn money for tuition. He participated in many combination jam-sessions-and-sketching-trips to service hospitals during World War II. He married a fellow student, Evelyn, and later joined with several former classmates to open an advertising agency in St. Louis. The business did not do well during the Great Depression, and Parker and Evelyn moved to New York City in 1935. They had one son together, Kit Parker.
Parker got a break when a cover illustration he did for House Beautiful won a national competition. He soon was producing illustrations for Chatelaine, Collier's, Ladies' Home Journal and Woman's Home Companion. Starting in 1938, he produced a total of 50 covers over a 13-year period for the Ladies' Home Journal.
He also sold illustrations to Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, The Saturday Evening Post, Town and Country and Vogue.
Parker later became part of the art colony in suburban New Rochelle, New York, which was well known for its unprecedented number of prominent American illustrators (more than fifty percent of the illustrations in the country's leading publications were done by artists from New Rochelle). The colony included artists J. C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell.
Parker is credited with creating a new school of illustration and was much imitated. In an effort to distinguish himself from his imitators, he worked in a variety of styles, themes and media. Examples range from children's crayons to acrylics. In cooperation with the magazine's art director, he secretly provided every illustration in an issue of Cosmopolitan, using different pseudonyms, styles and mediums for each story.
Parker moved his family to Carmel, California by 1961, and with the demise of many of the magazines, his output of illustrations was curtailed. In 1964 Sports Illustrated sent Parker to Monte Carlo for the Grand Prix to create a series of illustrations capturing the event for the magazine.
Parker was one of the founding faculty members for the Famous Artists School. He was elected to the Society of Illustrators' Hall of Fame in 1965. Over the years, he won more than twenty-five gold medals and awards of excellence in Art Directors Club and Society of Illustrators' shows. He was also a past president of the Westport Artists. He continued to do occasional assignments for publications such as Sports Illustrated and Boys' Life.
Al Parker died in 1985, aged 79, and is survived by his son Kit Parker, founder of the film company Kit Parker Films, a 16mm non-theatrical film library. A stamp commemorating his art was issued by the United States Postal Service on 1 February 2001 as part of the American Illustrators Issue series.
Reading Recommendations & Content Considerations
How I Make a Picture by Al Parker
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