"In the purchase of a car from income, the average allowance usually more than covers the initial Pierce-Arrow payment."
That line in the first poster completely stumped me, until I realized that Pierce-Arrows were being pitched not at people who actually worked for a living, but at those who had "incomes" from investments and trusts. No wonder traffic officers would be deferential.
Adolph Treidler (1886-1981) wrote a charming little memoir for Automobile Quarterly's Third Quarter 1976 issue. If you do the subtraction, that would have made him about 90 years old at the time. By that point, he had been retired from illustration for around 25 years. And some of his best known work was done as long ago as 1910 for Pierce-Arrow, one of the leading makers of luxury cars in America.
This site has a tiny biography along with examples showing a variety of Treidler's work. But there was no really useful biographical sketch that I could find on the Internet.
According to his AQ memoir, Treidler was born in West Cliff, Colorado. The family moved to various mining towns in that state until leaving for San Francisco about 1898. He worked for an advertising agency while in his teens, experiencing the 1906 earthquake and fire shortly before departing for Chicago. There he stayed for about a year and a half, working as an artist for the Chicago Tribune newspaper. Then he moved on to New York where one of his paintings that happened to include a Pierce-Arrow car caught the eye of a man who soon became an art director at the Calkins & Holden advertising agency, which held the Pierce-Arrow account. From that point, his career took off like a rocket.
Besides Pierce-Arrow ad art (which ended around 1930, when the company was rapidly declining), he did poster and other advertising art for the French Line, Bermuda tourism, the government war effort in both world wars, and Chesterfield cigarettes.
Gallery
[Image]Pierce-Arrow ad harking back to an earlier Treidler ad
[Image]Pierce Arrow ad art, Literary Digest - 5 January 1929
[Image]Chesterfield cigarette advertising
[Image]Poster for Bermuda tourism
[Image]World War 2 poster - 1942
[Image]Poster for Furness line
Treidler was surprisingly versatile when it came to style. The posters dealing with Bermuda would seem to have been done by another artist than the one who did the World War 2 poster. And it might have been a third artist who did the Chesterfield ad art and a fourth who worked for Pierce-Arrow. But of course this was all Treidler. I wouldn't quite place him in the top echelon of illustrators because he didn't do story illustration so far as I can tell. But as an advertising artist he was indeed good.
posted by Donald Pittenger at 1:00 AM on Jan 28, 2013
3 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formThe slogan on the war poster is presumably a wordier version of the British "Loose talk costs lives".
Anyway, I agree with you - what fine illustrations!
January 28, 2013 at 4:23 AM
"In the purchase of a car from income, the average allowance usually more than covers the initial Pierce-Arrow payment."
That line in the first poster completely stumped me, until I realized that Pierce-Arrows were being pitched not at people who actually worked for a living, but at those who had "incomes" from investments and trusts.
No wonder traffic officers would be deferential.
Peter
January 29, 2013 at 5:33 PM
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