Saturday, September 01, 2012

Something for the Weekend...by Angus McBride




Other than model soldiers the Legatus collects vintage men's magazines, particularly from the seventies.  We were intrigued by this illustration, therefore, from Mayfair's January 1975 edition, which we just picked up on eBay.  This was a particularly fine issue featuring a very undressed Lesley Anne Down who, alone, made my forced, family-driven viewing of Upstairs, Downstairs bearable (once Nicola Pagett had left the series).


The luscious Susan, photographed by Clive McLean (whose wife Stephanie was the first full-frontal Penthouse Pet and would eventually marry Barry Sheene - in fact they met for the first time that year)

The style of this illustration to a story about a London club called "The Shiny Nun" (hence the wimples) looked rather familiar and, on closer examination, the "McB" signature confirmed my view that it was an Angus McBride painting.


Queen Zenobia from Rome's Enemies 5: The Desert Frontier


Now McBride often included some attractive looking women in some of his military illustrations for Osprey  (such as his sensuously enticing Queen Zenobia here) but I hadn't been aware that he illustrated for the likes of Mayfair




I wondered if he had done any more such pictures and then, lo, in the very same issue we have this saucy cartoon of Romans and an octopus (all very Hokusai).  What a very talented artist he was!  More research is obviously necessary!

Since I wrote this post and as it still gets a a lot of hits I have added a Post on more of his work for Mayfair magazine here.

3 comments:

  1. Great illustrations. Earlier I wrote an article with numerous images and videos on paintings and drawing inspired on Hokusai's The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (c.1814). You can find it here: https://shungagallery.com/hokusais-the-dream-of-the-fishermans-wife/

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