Irv Docktor

Irving Seidmon Docktor (July 10, 1918 - February 14, 2008) was a prolific artist and educator best known for his work as a book and magazine illustrator in the 1950s and 1960s. His psychologically arresting and aesthetically distinctive style, featuring angular often overlapping faces executed with a moody palette, made him one of the most instantly recognizable illustrators of his era. An early work on the history of paperbacks identified Docktor and Edward Gorey as executing some of the most interesting and appealing cover designs in the field.

Irving Seidmont Docktor was born and raised in Philadelphia. He graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia, and won a scholarship to the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) and the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. A weight lifter in his youth, Docktor performed in walk-on roles with Mary Binney Montgomery's ballet troupe while he was in college as a supernumerary actor, a job he obtained one day while sketching the dancers during their rehearsal. When Docktor noticed the male lead had trouble lifting his partner, he stepped in and was offered a position on the spot.

After graduating from art school, Docktor entered the army and was trained in photography. During World War II, he served as an aerial photographer in a map-making unit in the Technical Intelligence Team based in Australia and the Philippines. The sketches he made during this period served as visual referents for some of his later work, such as his illustrations for a book on the Battle of Bataan.

Upon his discharge, Docktor moved first to Flushing, Queens, New York, then to Fort Lee, New Jersey, and entered the commercial art world, producing illustrations that graced the covers and interiors of many novels, children’s books and record albums. Much of his early work was for Grosset & Dunlap. His dark palette and sense of the macabre led him to paint a number of covers for mystery novels and collections of supernatural fiction. He illustrated a number of books in the "Lookouts" juvenile mystery series by Christine Noble Govan and Emmy West in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and he executed cover paintings for five science fiction novels by Robert A. Heinlein. He used his children and neighbors as models. His cover for Govan and West's Mystery of Rock City, for example, pictures his two sons and their playmates scrambling on the hillside near their house in Fort Lee.

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