The place of the illustrator in the publishing industry was similar to that of an actor or actress in the motion picture industry. Most illustrators were equivalent to small-time contract players in the movies: they were earning a living in an exciting field but were somewhat exploited and certainly were not getting rich. Once an artist became popular with the public, however, competing magazines often fought to get him or her under exclusive contract. Charles Dana Gibson and Harrison Fisher were among the numerous artists who parlayed their popularity into extraordinary fees.

Magazine and advertising work were not the only avenues open to illustrators. American publishers produced many handsome illustrated books throughout this period. Although the standard for book illustration was set in Great Britain, those created by Howard Pyle and several of his students—most notably N. C. Wyeth—are on par with the better British efforts. Wyeth’s cover illustration for The Boy’s King Arthur and Bruce on the Beach, in The Scottish Chiefs, by Jane Porter, and William Aylward’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea are all fine examples of American book illustration.

After 1920 American illustration became less dependent on fine art as photography gained in popularity and modernist trends in the fine arts proved alien to the public at large. In the 1920s and 1930s art directors adopted a more modern, European philosophy of graphic design that emphasized the decorative possibilities of illustration more than its ability to communicate a specific message. Most illustrations during this period were stylistically flat and thin, and more and more of it was copied from photographs. By 1940 the printed illustration had become merely an element of graphic design.

It was natural that photography marginalized illustration since photography is well suited to most editorial applications other than fiction illustration and cartoons. What is striking, retrospectively, is that it took photography the better part of a century to vanquish the public's preference for paintings and drawings. The American Civil War was extensively photographed but the use of photos as magazine covers did not become standard for another 70 years. Throughout the 1920s, even magazines about silent film stars—a quintessential photographic topic—had painted covers.

The advent of the "talkies" in 1927 seems to have cemented the position of motion pictures as America’s dominant cultural medium, with the increased realism that sound brought to film most likely playing a decisive role in the public's long-delayed acceptance of the photograph as our primary visual medium. Throughout the 1930s the photograph, and the photographic aesthetic, largely supplanted the painted illustration. Whereas the old illustrators were adamant in saying they never used photographs (even when they did), the later realistic illustrators could scarcely operate without them. To say a painting or drawing looked like a photograph became a compliment, not a statement of aesthetic insincerity.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s transparent watercolor and gouache supplanted oil paint as the illustrator’s primary medium. These water-based paints lent themselves to the flat simplicity and clean, bright colors that increasingly modernistic art directors preferred, and were quick-drying and suited to much smaller originals. Gouache and watercolor are efficient and reproduce in print much better than oil paint so the relative decline of the large oil painted illustration was not surprising. What is surprising is that illustrators had, for more than a generation, executed large and difficult to reproduce oil paintings to be printed only a few inches on a side. The improbable era of easel painting as illustration was an manifestation of the illustrator's seriousness of purpose and sense of connection to the 19th century academic fine art traditions.

Many factors were involved in the decline of illustration as the primary visual medium in the United States. At its height the illustration was inspired directly by fine art. As fine art turned its back on centuries of progressive development of sophisticated representation the public, not surprisingly, lost interest in the medium. Technological advances led to increasingly more compelling mass media. Film became richer with each passing year, with quality sound and Technicolor. Radio replaced many of the day-to-day entertainment function of the magazine.

No mass-medium is likely to stay on top forever. Perhaps television will be obsolete  someday. If, however, television ceases to dominate American culture it is unimaginable that its profound past influence will go unrecognized the way we have largely forgotten the great influence that illustration had on American life only a few decades ago. To understand why illustration has largely been forgotten, it is helpful to take a dispassionate look at what the golden age of illustration was—and what it was not.

Much illustration during the Golden Age was mediocre and aesthetically uninspired. The subjects tended toward the trite, and only exceptional works offered depth of vision, experience, or feeling. Illustration was, after all, a popular art form, and popularity often comes at the price of appealing to the lowest common denominator. It is all too easy to dismiss illustration art by focusing on its most banal examples. Nevertheless, I would suggest that if we can find no serious, lasting merit in the best of American illustration, then there is little value in any distinctively American art.