Frances Tipton Hunter
| Frances Tipton Hunter | |
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| Born | Sept. 1, 1896 |
| Died | Mar. 3, 1957 |
Frances Tipton Hunter (1896–1957) was an illustrator who created covers for The Saturday Evening Post and many other magazines between the 1920s and 1950s. Her work is very similar in style to that of Norman Rockwell.
Hunter was born on September 1, 1896 in Howard, Pennsylvania, to Michael Howard, an insurance salesman, and Laura Tipton. After her mother’s death, Hunter and her older brother, Harold, moved in with her aunt and uncle Frances and Edward McEntire in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, when she was 5 or 6 years old.
Her love of drawing and art began when she was three years old; whenever she visited her grandmother, Hunter drew figures on the wallpaper in the stairway, apparently finding the wallpaper boring and unimpressive. Hunter remarked in an interview that “drawing is a perfectly natural thing, for the first impulse is to express one’s self, and the easiest way for a child to do this is by pictures.” She painted her first artwork in the 6th grade at Transeau Elementary School.
Titled “We Bark for Transeau,” the piece depicted 3 puppies in a basket. Puppies would become her favorite subject. While attending Williamsport High School, Hunter illustrated for the school’s Cherry and White publication and played “unimpressive basketball,” according to herself. In 1914, during her senior year, Hunter received first prize in a Williamsport Civic Club essay contest about her three favorite artworks at a James V. Brown Library art exhibition. The judges agreed that she best interpreted the artists’ meaning of the paintings.
After graduation, Hunter studied illustration under Thornton Oakley at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art. She then attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial. While studying in Philadelphia, Hunter was hired by John Wanamaker to illustrate a line of children’s fashion for catalogs and advertisements. She was paid $500. While illustrating in the children’s fashion industry, Hunter was sent the actual clothes in order to paint the necessary details of the garment accurately. She moved back to Williamsport for about 6 years, before returning to Philadelphia. While in Williamsport for the 1956 Sesquicentennial, Hunter was named one of the first Pennsylvania ambassadors by the state Chamber of Commerce, and was named “A Distinguished Daughter of Williamsport.”
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