The Pin Up Girl

Before we talk about the curvy, swervy, plus-size-bikini-clad Hilda as presented by Duane Bryers, I am going to set the stage with a little history of the pin up girl. Let’s go back in time now, with a short story about a few of the most talented and popular Pin Up illustrators in American history.

Earl Christy, (1883-1961)

We’ll begin with the prolific Earl Christy, who’s porcelain-doll-like illustrations appeared on everything from Hollywood magazine covers and commercial advertisements to sheet music and postcards. His work can be found going back as early as 1906. His movie posters and covers he painted for “Photoplay” and other Hollywood magazines are now valuable collector items.

Earl Moran (1893-1984)

Earl Moran’s artistic genius appeared on everything from Sears and Roebuck catalogs to Life magazine and millions of Brown and Bigelow Calendars. How he’s remembered most is through his pin-ups. Moran’s stunningly rendered pastel “visions” offer more situational variety than any other major illustrator. Of his most enduring legacies are his 1940s paintings of a breathtaking 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 arriving home from a trip to France in 1919, he opened a studio in Greenwich Village where he painted the Ziegfeld Folly girls. Later, while in Hollywood, all the great stars of the era posed for him. Popular actresses like Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn were all painted by him. He even talked Boris Karloff into posing for him on the set of the original “Frankenstein”.

He refused to work from photographs and was always on the quest for the perfect model. When asked why he preferred a live model over a photograph, he said, “I want the living person in front of me. As I look at her again and again and again while I work, I get a thousand fresh, vivid impressions… all the glow, exuberance, and spontaneous joy that leaps from a young and happy heart.”

Armstrong’s pastel pin ups of his idealized, scantily clad,”girl next door” have a distinctive, luminous and shimmering quality to them. His paintings of healthy, nubile young women are some of the most memorable of all the famous illustrators. He was truly a man of rarefied talent.

George Petty (1894-1975)

The Pin-Up finally exploded into the popular culture with Esquire Magazine’s introduction of the “Petty Girl” in 1933. Slender, flirtatious and extremely shapely, the Petty Girl became an American institution, capturing our hearts and minds for more than twenty years. From 1933 to 1956, her images were seen in tens of millions of places; every where from magazines and billboards to playing cards and match books, even aircraft “nose art” in WWII. In 1950, she was made into a movie starring Robert Cummings and Elsa Lanchester.

Gil Elvgren (1914-1980)

No pin up gallery is complete without displaying the breathtaking talent of Gil Elvgren. His enchanting, dreamy renderings of the nubile female form cannot be eclipsed in genius by any other artist. He was sublimely talented! A student of the Minneapolis Art Institute, he liked to paint girls who were new to the modeling business. He believed the ideal pin up was a girl with a fifteen year old face on a twenty year old body, so he combined the two. During the forty two years spanning 1930-1972, he produced over five hundred paintings of beautiful young women, nearly all painted on oil and canvas. Today, his fully developed, finished works of art are second only in value to 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 teen. Most don’t realize he was actually born in Peru, and didn’t come to the US until 1916. He arrived on Ellis Island via Europe, where he had been since 1911. While there, he had studied in both Geneva and Zurich, and by the time had made his way here, he was already a gifted talent coming into bloom. Within three years he had hung out his own shingle and was painting store fronts and window displays for New York City merchants.

One warm afternoon in May 1916, while painting a window display for a downtown merchant, he was approached by a employee of the Ziegfeld Follies and asked to show his work to the great Ziegfeld himself. Within forty eight hours, he was commissioned to paint 12 portraits of the leading stars of the 1919 season of the Ziegfeld Follies. They were for the lobby of the New Amsterdam Theater.

From that first commission on, Alberto Vargas was an artist in high demand. He painted every major star of the Ziegfeld Follies and later major Hollywood stars like 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 by 1945 was the most famous glamor illustrator in the world. Baby boomers all know him as the creator of Playboy Magazine’s Vargas Girl. He painted over 150 of his Vargas Girl masterpieces for Playboy.

He was married 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 just a few more times doing The Cars “Candy O” album cover and two album 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 shapely, wondrously round, perfectly proportioned, plus size, pear shaped beauty in Pin Up girl history: Duane Bryers’ “Hilda”

One night, while prowling “Google Images” for curvaceous content, I found myself at Les Toil’s Big Beautiful Pin Up Gallery. I clicked through and followed his fun and curiously titled links looking for the well-nourished, feminine imagery I had started out that night looking for. After I got done admiring Les’ talent, I went back to his homepage and clicked on a cheerful teal and yellow banner with the name “Hilda” written across it. I clicked on it, not prepared at all for what I was about to see.

As soon as the page opened, I stopped and looked in wonder. It was one of those moments when you’re seeing something with which you’re completely taken; the world around you seems to disappear, and everything goes completely silent as your focus narrows, taking in what’s in front of you.

Discovering Duane Bryers’ Hilda was like discovering lost treasure. I recognized her right away. I remembered her as a perfect likeness of what I had for years idealized in the feminine form; round, soft, pear-shaped, plump, and shapely to the extreme.

If one’s natural male instinct is to respond to the rounder, softer, more generously proportioned woman, you will understand why there is so much to like about her. From her long, soft legs, girlish face, plump, inviting arms, to her hips, round and wide, you see a vision of femininity forming in front of you. Add to all that her ample, well-developed breasts, soft, yielding tummy and glorious hip-waist ratio, and you discover she is an ideal example of full-figure perfection. The perfect plus size, pear-shaped, nubile beauty.

Unlike the stick-thin, female icons so popular today, Hilda has not one angular feature. She sublimely embodies the old fashioned womanly ideals of “round and soft”. 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 didn’t use a model at all and painted from memory or fantasy. A feat, according to pin up artist Les Toil, “most impressive!” “Hilda” is owned by Brown and Bigelow

This article was made possible through research from various sources on the web including Google images, The Pin Up Files, and the Hilda page of Les Toil’s Big Beautiful Pin Up Gallery.