George Hughes

George Hughes: the Saturday Evening Post’s chronicler of American domestic life

A New York training, and no detour through college

George Hughes was born in New York City in 1907 and grew up in the city that was then the centre of American publishing and advertising. He skipped college and went straight to the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, entering illustration as a working trade rather than as a fine-art career.

115 covers, and the invention of the “sitcom cover”

His first cover for The Saturday Evening Post appeared on the issue of 17 April 1948. He went on to paint 115 of them, the last regular one on 14 July 1962, plus a final cover for the magazine’s 1971 revival. He also illustrated for McCall’s, Woman’s Day, American Magazine, Reader’s Digest and Good Housekeeping.

Hughes is credited as one of the originators of what became known as the sitcom cover: instead of a single figure or a symbol, the cover carried a small domestic comedy with several characters and a situation to work out. Readers spent minutes on those images rather than seconds. He was, with Norman Rockwell, among the very few Post cover artists whose work outlasted the magazine’s turn to photography.

What the paintings actually show

The 105 works in this collection are drawn from that body of work. They are scenes of mid-century American life observed from close up: a boy refusing his medicine, bottles taken back to the store for the deposit, a tuba practised through a party wall, a car being worked on in a driveway, a swimming pool, a bridge party, a first day at the beach. The interest is almost always in the situation and in the faces reacting to it.

After the magazines

When the illustrated weeklies declined, Hughes moved in the 1970s to portrait painting, which occupied him until his death in 1990.

Reproductions of George Hughes’s work

Every piece in this collection is made to order, either as a print on synthetic canvas or hand-painted in oil, in the size and finish you choose. Oil paintings are created by a senior artist, and every piece is quality-checked with photo and video before it ships.