The pin up girl
Before talking about the curvy Hilda dressed in a plus size bikini, the stage will be set with a bit of pin up girl history. I’ll take you back in time now, with a short story about some of the most talented and popular Pin Up illustrators in American history.
Earl Christy, (1883-1961)
We’ll start with the prolific Earl Christy, whose porcelain doll illustrations appeared on everything from Hollywood magazine covers and commercials to sheet music and postcards. His work dates back to 1906. His movie posters and covers that he painted for “Photoplay” and other Hollywood magazines are now valuable collector’s items.
Count Moran (1893-1984)
Earl Moran’s artistic genius appeared in everything from Sears and Roebuck catalogs to Life magazine and millions of Brown and Bigelow calendars. What he remembers most is through his pin ups. Moran’s stunningly rendered pastel “visions” offer more variety of situations than any other major illustrator. Of his most enduring legacies are his paintings from the 1940s of an impressive
young model named Norma Jean Baker. He painted more images of her than any other artist.
Rolf Armstrong (1889-1960)
Rolf Armstrong was another famous Brown and Bigelow calendar artist. After coming home from a trip to France in 1919, he opened a studio in Greenwich Village where he painted the Ziegfeld Folly girls. Later, while he was in Hollywood, all the big stars of the time posed for him. Popular actresses such as Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Katherine Hepburn were painted by him. He even talked about Boris Karloff posing for him on the set of the original “Frankenstein.”
He refused to work from photographs and was always in search of the perfect model. When asked why he preferred a live model to a photograph, he said: “I want the person alive in front of me. When I look at her again and again while I work, I get a thousand fresh and vivid impressions … all the glow , the exuberance and spontaneous joy that springs from a young and happy heart. “
Armstrong’s pastel pin-ups of his idealized, scantily-clad “girl next door” have a distinctive, bright and sparkling quality. His paintings of healthy and nubile young women are some of the most memorable of all famous illustrators. He truly was a man of rarefied talent.
George Petty (1894-1975)
The Pin Up finally exploded into popular culture with the introduction of “Petty Girl” in Esquire magazine in 1933. Slender, flirty, and extremely shapely, Petty Girl became an American institution, capturing our hearts and minds for over twenty years. years. From 1933 to 1956, his images were seen in tens of millions of places; everywhere from magazines and billboards to card games and match books, even the “art of the nose” of airplanes in WWII. In 1950, it was made into a movie starring Robert Cummings and Elsa Lanchester.
Gil Elvgren (1914-1980)
No pin up gallery is complete without showcasing the impressive talent of Gil Elvgren. Her charming and dreamy depictions of the nubile female form cannot be overshadowed in genius by any other artist. He had a sublime talent! A student at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, she liked to paint girls who were new to the modeling business. I believed that the ideal pin up was a girl with
a fifteen-year-old face in a twenty-year-old body, so he combined the two. During the forty-two years spanning 1930-1972, he produced more than five hundred paintings of beautiful young women, almost all painted on oil and canvas. Today, his fully developed and finished works of art are second only in value by the paintings of Alberto Vargas.
Alberto Vargas (1896-1982)
The most prolific and famous glamor illustrator of all time is Alberto Vargas. The son of Max Vargas, a famous and talented photographer in his own right, Alberto learned to airbrush from his father before he was a teenager. Most do not realize that he was actually born in Peru and did not come to the United States until 1916. He reached Ellis Island via Europe, where he had been since 1911. While
There, he had studied in both Geneva and Zurich, and by the time he got here, he was already a gifted talent that was flourishing. In three years he had hung his own tiles and was painting shop fronts and shop windows for New York City merchants.
One warm afternoon in May 1916, while painting a shop window for a downtown merchant, an employee of the Ziegfeld Follies approached him and asked him to show his work to the great Ziegfeld in person. In forty-eight hours, he was commissioned to paint 12 portraits of the top stars of the 1919 season of Ziegfeld Follies. They were for the lobby of the New Amsterdam Theater.
From that first commission, Alberto Vargas was a highly sought after artist.
He painted all the major stars of the Ziegfeld Follies and later Hollywood stars such as Betty Grable, Jane Russell, Ann Sheridan, Ava Gardner, Linda Darnell, Marlene Dietrich, Loretta Young and even Marilyn Monroe, all posed for him.
In 1940 he replaced the great George Petty at Esquire magazine and in 1945 he became the most famous glamor illustrator in the world.
All baby boomers know him as the creator of Vargas Girl from Playboy magazine. He painted over 150 of his Vargas Girl masterpieces for Playboy.
He was married for over forty years to the love of his life, Anna Mae Clift. When she passed away in 1974, he lost most of his creative drive and worked a few more times on The Cars’ “Candy O” album cover and two covers for Bernadette Peters. He passed away in Los Angeles in December 1982.
Now, the reason this article was written … to talk about the most shaped, wonderfully round, perfectly proportioned, plus size, pear-shaped beauty in Pin Up girl history: “Hilda” by Duane Bryers.
One night, while browsing “Google Images” looking for curvy content, I came across Les Toil’s Big Beautiful Pin Up Gallery. I clicked and followed his funny and curiously titled links in search of the well-nourished female images he had started looking for that night.
Once I was done admiring Les’s talent, I went back to her home page and clicked on a cheery teal and yellow banner with the name “Hilda” written on it. I clicked on it, totally unprepared for what I was about to see.
As soon as the page opened, I stopped and stared in amazement. It was one of those moments when you are seeing something that completely captivates you; the world around you seems to disappear, and everything becomes completely silent as your focus narrows, assimilating what is in front of you.
Discovering Hilda was like discovering a lost treasure. I recognized her immediately. He remembered her as a perfect resemblance to what he had idealized for years in female form; round, smooth, pear-shaped, plump and shapely to the end.
If your natural male instinct is to respond to the rounder, smoother, and more generously proportioned woman, you will understand why there is so much to like about her. From her long, smooth legs, her girlish face, her plump, inviting arms, to her round, wide hips, you see a vision of femininity forming in front of you. Add to all that her full, well-developed breasts, soft, supple tummy, and glorious hip-to-waist ratio, and you’ll find that she is an ideal example of full-figure perfection. The perfect plus size, pear-shaped,
nubile beauty.
Unlike the stick-thin feminine icons so popular today, Hilda does not have an angular feature. She sublimely embodies the ancient feminine ideals of “round and smooth.” She is feminine to the nth degree.
Duane Bryers was the first illustrator to use plus-size models as subjects in his pin-up art. Sometimes he did not use any model and painted from memory or from fantasy. A feat, according to pin-up artist Les Toil, “most impressive!”