John Carlton Atherton (January 7, 1900 - September 16, 1952) was an American painter, magazine illustrator, printmaker, writer and designer. His works form part of numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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Early years
"Jack" was the son of James Chester Atherton (1868-1928) and Carrie B. Martin (1871-1909). He was born in Brainerd, Minnesota. His father was Canadian born. His parents relocated from Minnesota to Washington State, with his maternal grandparents whilst he was still an infant. He attended high school in Spokane, Washington.
During his early years he never displayed an aptitude for art; rather, his first love being nature and the activities he relished there, mainly fishing and hunting. He enlisted in 1917, serving briefly in the U.S. Navy for a year during World War I. At the end of the war, determined to get an education he worked various part-time jobs, as a sign painter and playing a banjo in a dance band to pay his enrolment fee at the College of the Pacific and The California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Once there, he also worked in the surrounding studios developing his oil painting techniques.
A first prize award of $500 at the annual exhibition of the Bohemian Club in 1929, financed his one way trip to New York City, which helped to launch his career as an artist.
Artistic career
Atherton achieved recognition in New York City and elsewhere during the 1930s. Having exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, his paintings began to be collected by museums; including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Atherton had aspired to be a fine artist, however his first paid jobs were for commercial art firms designing advertisements for corporations such as General Motors, Shell Oil, Container Corporation of America, and Dole. However, by 1936, encouraged primarily by friends, such as Alexander Brook, an acclaimed New York realist painter, he returned to the fine arts.
Atherton accomplished his first one-man show in Manhattan in 1936. His Painting, “The Black Horse” won the $3000 fourth prize from among a pool of 14,000 entries. This painting forms part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection in New York.
Atherton collaborated with Joseph Binder and Albert Staehle producing posters for the 1939 New York World's Fair.
His poster for the New York World's Fair of 1939 displayed surrealist elements as observed by the burnt orange background and a blue floating earth. It featured Lady Liberty holding the symbols of the World's Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere, as well as Earth in her lap against an orange background. The Trylon and Perisphere were designed by Wallace K. Harrison and J. André Fouilhoux and were used to showcase the futuristic design that the Fair aimed for. The official colors of the fair were blue and orange are evident in his poster.
His reputation increased with his art deco stone lithograph poster for the 1939 New York World's Fair.
In 1941, his design won first place in the Museum of Modern Arts “National Defense Poster Competition”.
Atherton was well known for his World War II posters, including his award-winning "Buy a Share in America" poster from 1941. He produced a series of illustrations for the United States Office of War Information during World War II.
Selected Public Collections
Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Fleming Museum of Art, Burlington, Vermont
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT
Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
De Young Museum, San Francisco
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
Butler Institute of American Art Youngstown, OH
Personal
On November 2, 1926, he married Polly “Maxine” Breese (1903-1997). They had one daughter, Mary Atherton, born in 1932.
He died in New Brunswick, Canada in 1952, at the age of 52 while fly-fishing, just after having landed a 25-pound salmon.
Legacy
The Western Connecticut State University holds an extensive archive on this artist.
His wife, Maxine also wrote a memoir “The Fly Fisher and the River,” which John and Maxine's granddaughter, Catherine Varchaver, edited and published years later in 2016. Maxine remarried in 1960.
Ancestry
He is a direct descendant of James Atherton, one of the First Settlers of New England; who arrived in Dorchester, Massachusetts in the 1630s.
His direct ancestor, Benjamin Atherton was from Colonial Massachusetts and settled in Maugerville, New Brunswick in 1765. His grandfather, Albert Atherton (1833-1922) was a lumber merchant who relocated to Minnesota between 1881 and 1885. His Canadian born aunt, Maggie L Atherton (1865-1946), gave an account of the Atherton ancestry and retained a number of newspaper clippings of Atherton‘s painting winning the first prize of $500 awarded by Senator James D. Phelan in San Francisco in 1929.
Biography
Falk, Peter H., ed. “Who Was Who in American Art”. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1999.
Berman, Greta/Wechsler, Jeffrey, “Realism and Realities: The Other Side of American Painting, 1940-1960,” The Gallery: New Brunswick, NJ, 1981.
Cohn, Jan, Covers of the Saturday Evening Post: Seventy Years of Outstanding Illustration, Studio (October 1, 1995).
Hughes, Edan, Artists in California, 1786–1940
Watson, Ernest W, “Forty American Illustrators and How they Work”: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1946