Elbert McGran, or E.M., Jackson, born 1896, was one of the principal artists for The Saturday Evening Post and Country Gentleman magazines, with 58 covers to his credit.
He showed an interest in drawing from an early age. As a child there was only one art teacher in town from which he could take lessons. He graduated from The Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in architecture. In 1917, he secured a position in an architect's office in New York, but his deep love of pictures and colour drew him towards nightly visits to the Beaux Arts Institute of Design on Seventy-sixth Street, where he studied painting, drawing, anatomy, and sculpture. He soon began to feel confident about his craft and chose to switch professions. At twenty-two, he painted a picture of a man smoking a pipe, the blissful expression on the subject's face being seen through the curling smoke. This picture was bought by a large tobacco company, which ordered seven more to be used in a series.
Although questioning whether this was a one-time success or something he could count on as a career, he decided to take the risk. He resigned from his architecture job, rented a studio, and engaged Allen Simpson, the gentleman with the soulful smoke, to continue posing. "My pockets were pretty nearly empty" he confessed, "but my hopes were high. There I was launched, or thought I was, in commercial art." He immediately made friends with the well-known, established illustrator James Montgomery Flagg who is best remembered for his 1917 poster of Uncle Sam created for United States Army recruitment during World War I. Flagg soon became something of a mentor. Jackson soon sold his first illustrations as a young man. His first magazine cover appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in January 1921. It depicted a bellhop delivering a shoe on a silver tray to a honeymoon couple in a hotel. The original of this picture now hangs in the main office of the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia.
An artistic specialty of Jackson’s was painting women in poses that made them appear glamorous amidst architecturally authentic backgrounds. His technique was spontaneous as he painted from posed models. Usually, he illustrated for manuscripts involving romance and high society. However, he also illustrated for a wide variety of genres, including murder mystery and masculine adventure.
More than thirty of Jackson’s The Saturday Evening Post covers were illustrated during the 1920s and 30s. Jackson drew many covers that were sentimental or humorous. Jackson also painted portraits that represented the evolving modern relationships between men and women at the time, such as the 10 May 1930 Post cover of a young man and a young woman sitting back to back at a barber shop taking in one another’s new hairdos.
Jackson also received commissions for illustrations for stories in books by such authors as Fannie Hurst, Kathleen Norris, Louis Bromfield, Rex Beach, Faith Baldwin, Pearl Buck, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Edna Ferber, Harold Bell Wright, and Robert W. Chambers.
Through known primarily for his realist/representational art style, his work at The Saturday Evening Post showed a more whimsical and varied side to his long and successful career as an illustrator. In addition to the stories he illustrated for many magazines, he also designed covers for publications such as Collier's, Country Gentleman and The Ladies' Home Journal.
As tastes and technology changed, hand painted illustration art all but disappeared, replaced in large part by photography. This change pushed Jackson in new directions. In his later years, he designed and produced custom fabrics for New York interior decorators. He had an office and showroom on 57th Street in New York.
He also designed memorials. Many of the tombstones in Magnolia Cemetery in Augusta were designed by Jackson. Perhaps the most notable is the bronze figure of Paul Hamilton Hayne, the Augusta poet. Elbert McGran Jackson died in 1963 at the age of 66 and was buried in Summerville Cemetery in Augusta.
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