I am just back from a very festive wedding in Mexico, blitzed and therefore completely incapable of presenting a proper post. But I have been saving up some images by Jazz Age commercial artist John Held, Jr. (1889-1958) for a while, and today seems like the perfect time to put them out there. Held’s popular flapper images, appearing as magazine cover and content illustrations throughout the 1920s, are a perfect representation of their age, but it was his pictorial maps which first caught my eye. I also like the posters he created for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, enticing travelers to locations all around New England and beyond, northward, the same direction my travels will take me this summer. No more south, except for Rhode Island and maybe Connecticut! Held used the term “Vacationland” several times in his New Haven posters, but I never liked that term while growing up in Maine so I streamlined his alternative “Summer Play Land” for a more timeless title.

Travel Posters by John Held Jr. from Artsy and Swann Auction Galleries Archives.

Held was a wonderful illustrator but his work cannot be confined to that genre; even though he published over 100 cartoons in the New Yorker in the 1920s and 1930s he can’t be identified exclusively as a cartoonist either. He worked in many mediums: watercolor, ink drawings, engraving, woodblock prints, even sculpture. On several of his fanciful maps, he refers to himself as a cartographer, and he wrote as well as illustrated. In his commercial heyday in the 1920s he was reportedly the highest-paid graphic artist in America but his commissions declined and fortunes failed with the Depression. So he seems to define (some critics even say document) an era even as a moved on to less popular (flapper-less) artistic expressions. Many of his engravings and prints have an intentional primitivism that makes them almost timeless in my view, among them several Salem ships.

Cape Cod poster, 1931, David Pollack Vintage Posters; Ships by John Held, Syracuse University Museum; Ship Bonetta of Salem Departing from Leghorn, William Bunch Auctions & Apraisals.