Attempted Bloggery: Rube Goldberg

Showing posts with label Rube Goldberg. Show all posts

Saturday, July 5, 2025

Peter Arno: A Signed Publicity Still for "Artists and Models"

Peter Arno is one of six illustrators who appear together in a scene in the 1937 comedy "Artists and Models." The artists appear at a ball and draw Sandra Storme, "England's most famous model," supposedly to benefit a charity.

A publicity still from the movie is currently listed on eBay. It shows Arno pretending to draw Storme; his pencil point doesn't actually make contact with his sketch pad. The photo is signed by Arno and includes a small doodle of a woman's face.

Peter Arno and Sandra Storme

The photograph is priced at $4,000, although best offers will be entertained by the seller.

Peter Arno
eBay listing accessed July 4, 2025

https://www.e bay.com/itm/167431008348?

Peter Arno
eBay item description

I have added a detail of the inscription to someone named Joe taken from a previous eBay listing:

"To Joe
Best wishes
Peter
Arno"

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/peter-arno-artists-models-1937-1790188922

In the movie, the scene with the illustrators sketching Storme on stage at the ball begins at 1:18:37 and runs for five or six minutes through 1:23:50.

"Artists and Models" (1937)

"America's Leading Artists and Illustrators"

Peter Arno's drawing of Sandra Storme surrounded by artists

Peter Arno and Jack Benny

Later on during the day I posted this, the eBay seller made me an offer but—alas—it didn't move the needle.

February 23, 2026 Update: The price has climbed a bit higher, an unfortunate sign of the times.

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Sunday, November 10, 2024

Press Photo: Raoul Walsh and Peter Arno on the Set of "Artists and Models"

"Artists and Models" is a 1937 movie starring Jack Benny and Ida Lupino. Raoul Walsh directed the film. Several popular artists made cameo appearances as themselves, including Peter Arno, McClelland Barclay, Rube Goldberg, and Russell Patterson. A press photo stamped Movie Star News shows director Walsh, left, with cartoonist Arno. Hooray for Hollywood!

Raoul Walsh and Peter Arno
eBay listing ended September 22, 2024

https://www.ebay.com/itm/186687943085?_skw=Peter+Arno+Press+Photo&itmmeta=01JC9V50M4T51QA25S5YDDCWM5&hash=item2b7777f1ad:g:ZQIAAOSwF2Zm5HiI&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAA8HoV3kP08IDx%2BKZ9MfhVJKmOu4txOl9pgtWiTeKffZX6Yse2QnoHcPKEvhh4uiw6o3XJsF%2Fv0j2DGUCa2kxzJ%2FDdVCS56xh1d4w8S6rpRFV5P9O

SWb1X%2Bv4bCt8eOuQLcm4BJovGCoeFDJ%2FeHkLjhXO6Rp9e6ydx3J%2FhPex6naHtuudXm9DTtAxeLunTJM3h0FclEUC7SSQ9jK6YbVBRKvbIV6a8IWwZK0ySo%2F6puMpkm8lrs9AzAANG0Dt0zrAtLNuKIP0OgkUBVRCGy%2FGMXFxa2CMqsP1ZN59rEjFYPwGwyRxpSKkqYFXRqPgzsulmkA%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR9qKlLviZA

Raoul Walsh and Peter Arno
eBay item description

Raoul Walsh and Peter Arno
eBay bid history
It looks as if a single bid was placed in the last two seconds.

04796

Saturday, July 1, 2023

Rube Goldberg's Pipe

If you hang around New York enough, you'll find traces of the great cartoonists of yesteryear all over. Last night, after dinner on West 36th Street at Keens Steakhouse—the apostrophe has been abandoned to history—we admired a display that was a small part of the world's largest collection of churchwarden pipes. The chop house's past patrons included more than 90,000 members of the Pipe Club, whose pipes were registered and stored on the premises by a pipe warden, and dutifully retrieved when the customer returned by pipe boys. Many twentieth century luminaries were members of this club: Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Albert Einstein, Enrico Caruso, Will Rogers, Babe Ruth, Robert Benchley—and cartoonist Rube Goldberg. I've given his pipe it's own photograph:

Which is not to say that Goldberg's pipe doesn't share the display case with the pipes of some mighty fine people.

There are some more recent members of the Pipe Club as well. Some of the names may be familiar.

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Friday, February 10, 2023

The Society of Illustrators: Pay-Time and Play-Time

The thirtieth annual exhibition of the Society of Illustrators was held at the Harlow, McDonald Gallery early in the spring of 1932. It was the time of the Great Depression and, according to an ad found on eBay, many illustrators were out of work. The Society raised money to assist these artists by offering the public fifteen-minute portrait sketches and caricatures by some of the era's most celebrated illustrators. For five dollars ($108.32 in today's money), from March 28 to April 9, visitors could be immortalized by Peter Arno, W. T. Benda, Floyd Davis, James Montgomery Flagg, Rube Goldberg, Jefferson Machamer, Herb Roth, Tony Sarg, Otto Soglow, or C. D. Williams. For those who didn't lose their life savings in the Great Crash, it wasn't a bad deal at all.

What became of these portraits created more than ninety years ago for a good cause? Some of them must still be around, but how are we to recognize if they are from this event?

Society of Illustrators
eBay listing accessed January 29, 2023

https://www.ebay.com/itm/385378978259?hash=item59ba6089d3:g:JFoAAOSwm4Vj1XrP&amdata=enc%3AAQAHAAAAoKHAV2SB8Q%2BNkv8C22373E9efMvoyZ%2FkfzkhEInkS3QxduQMIWe2DSZrX%2BbtOCpf2g5Dw7gpCNcgSLnva1bubKZo2bn9gEu%2BOvttzW7YyBDSxehs%2BE8%2FI2Z9nlOF%2BDs1KchkRkXiyoYDLE4hysR1SMuczlU1DZBlnqZn7rTRma2ZsmHNaWlRvgwIAwOb6gbU5emIOCNWctiUuEsgxYwl8Y0%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR8astdzAYQ

Society of Illustrators
eBay item description

Note: Attempted Bloggery would like to post some of these portraits, so please search your family heirlooms.

The ad is illustrated by W. M. I don't recognize the initials. Could it be Wallace Morgan? Or somebody else?

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Tuesday, December 5, 2017

The 1946 Dutch Treat Show

If you were in town on November 9, 1946, you should have been at the Waldorf-Astoria Grand Ballroom for the annual Dutch Treat Show. Directed by no less a Dutch Treat Club member than George Abbott, the music included "The Dutch Treat Hymn" by Rodgers and Hammerstein. In fact, Richard Rodgers played a little piano as well.

The alternate title of the show was "What is Art?" That's always something worth pondering. The show's players were a veritable Who's Who in the world of illustration, publishing, and the performing arts. The performance included a comedy sketch by Rube Goldberg in which a young Wally Cox played someone named Stella—this was obviously classy stuff, and there were no women in the Dutch Treat Club to take the female roles anyway—and Vanity Fair's Frank Crowninshield (of the Algonquin Round Table too) played, naturally, a connoisseur. Harry Staton, manager of the Herald Tribune Syndicate, played a visitor from the newly-created United Nations.

George Abbott played in his own sketch alongside Bennett Cerf. Cartoonist Otto Soglow got to realize his dream of being an actor by cross-dressing as Gilda in a sketch by Deems Taylor. The New Yorker's Rea Irvin was one of many extras.

There was a lot more going on. Just take a look at the program. And please tip your waiter.

John E. Sheridan
The D.T. Presents the 1946 Show

"AND FINALLY—PLEASE TIP YOUR WAITER"

Note: My thanks again go to Stephen Kroninger for scanning this program which he found inserted in one of his Dutch Treat Club yearbooks.

Memorabilia of the Dutch Treat Club makes a welcome addition to the blog. I'd love to take a look at what odd items readers have on hand.

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The Dutch Treat Club

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Sunday, December 3, 2017

The Reconversion of Otto Soglow

The theme of the 1946 Dutch Treat Club yearbook was Reconversion or the Dutch Treat Club Gets Back to Normal: The Forty-First Anniversary of the Dutch Treat Club. The yearbook had section headings illustrated by the indefatigable Otto Soglow, each naughtily illustrating a different aspect of the postwar recovery or reconversion as it was somewhat technically termed. Stephen Kroninger has supplied Attempted Bloggery with the photos.

We begin with The Reconversion of Belles Lettres, all twenty-six of them, in no particular order;

1. The Reconversion of Belles Lettres
Otto Soglow
Reconversion or the Dutch Treat Club Gets Back to Normal:
The Forty-First Anniversary of the Dutch Treat Club, 1946