Coles Phillips
Coles Phillips was an American illustrator who lived from 1880 to 1927 and worked during the Golden Age of Illustration. He is known for his signature ‘fade-away girl’ and art style.
Clarence Coles Phillips was born in Springfield, Ohio. He attended Kenyon College between 1902 and 1904. Though he did not take any formal art classes at college, this is where he started showing his illustrations. He became the head illustrator for the school yearbook where he had his earliest work published. Phillips quit college before graduating and moved to Manhattan to pursue his art full time. He took his only formal art classes at the Chase School of Art for just three months before quitting to work in an advertising company that created advertisements in an assembly like fashion. Interestingly, in the art assembly line, Phillips created the model’s feet and became quite successful at illustrating “shapely” ankles. In 1906, he started his own advertising company, “C. C. Phillips & Co. Agency”. His former classmate, Edward Hopper, was one of his employees.
In 1907, Phillips sold his first illustration to the published magazine, Life (not the photography magazine of the same name). His art was successful and from then on, and he had no problem finding work. He soon after became hired on full time for Life magazine, a working relationship he would have for the rest of his life. In 1907, he met one of his earliest and most frequently used models, the nurse, Teresa Hyde, whom he would marry in 1910. After 1911, he changed his working name from C. Coles Phillips to Coles Phillips. Between 1912 and 1914, he solely illustrated all of the covers for Good Housekeeping. By this time, he was world renown.
Phillips was one of the artists at the forefront of social change who helped modernize the image of the ideal American woman. Previously, in the late nineteenth century, the ideal American woman was depicted as a prim and proper Gibson girl type, as made famous by Charles Dana Gibson. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the American woman’s image changed to a more modern, fun, and chic representation.
Phillips captured this new image in his illustrations and their widespread audience really helped American culture embrace the new twentieth century woman. His ladies were so beautiful, in fact, that some of his illustrations became the first “pin up girls.” Phillips was the first to use art deco with advertising design. His work graced the covers of magazines and advertisements, showing the new, more modern American woman and he only ever drew from life, refusing to draw from photographs.
Coles Phillips worked solely with watercolors and developed a signature ‘fade-away’ style which made use of negative space, where the subjects’ clothes would be the same color as the background and effectually disappear. Besides being a creative and new novel way of illustrating, this fade-away style had a far cheaper printing cost which publishers loved. In 1924, Philips was diagnosed with tuberculosis from the kidney, which would lead to his premature death. He died from respiratory failure in 1927 at just 47 years old.
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