Important information about tourism in Costa Rica - Florida

A friend of mine who teaches art history asked for my view on this question:

"How and when did the "Golden Age of Illustration" end? Did it end, or just shrink? Has there been a revival? Do you have thoughts on this, as an illustrator working with traditional media, in an imaginative realist genre, in the 21st century. How do artists now, relate to a golden age of illustration that supposedly ended? I would prefer to offer a hopeful analysis!"

My answer: A lot of illustrators who lived through the Golden Age years (from 1890-1920) complained that the great era of story illustration ended as the 1920s settled in, as a result of advertising, photographic illustrations, and other distractions such as radio, movies, and later TV. 

But if you look at magazines from the late '40s and early '50s, they were bursting with great illustrations, in creative layouts and strong storytelling. 

The 1940s and 1950s were a time of remarkable creativity under Coby Whitmore, Al Parker, and the other innovators. The '60s, '70s, and '80s was also a creative, productive era for story illustration, especially in paperback covers, movie posters, album covers and National Geographic illustrations: Consider Tom Lovell, Drew Struzan, James Bama, Frank Frazetta, and Mort Drucker. Big corporate accounts were still buying illustrated advertisements and annual reports all through the '70s and 80s.

When I started doing book covers and Nat Geo illustrations in the early 1980s, it sure felt like the Golden Age was still alive in my little corner of the profession. I didn't pay much attention to the famous illustrators that were popular in my time, but instead I oriented to Rockwell, Loomis, and Pyle and built my reality around their ideas. The art directors I was working with were giving me a lot of freedom, and there was a small but loyal fan base.

But there was no doubt that illustration has been far less mainstream for the last half century than it was in the days of Pyle, Wyeth, Rockwell, Leyendecker, and the illustrators of the "slicks." That difference is reflected in the fees illustrators receive. For instance, Charles Gibson was regarded like a movie star. The pay he would receive for a single pen and ink drawing would be equivalent to about $45,000 today.