Wednesday, May 01, 2024

An "unknown" Clifford Berryman self-portrait

This surfaced recently in the National Geographic archives before being sent out for deep storage. Berryman apparently drew it for the editor Gilbert H. Grovesnor as an RSVP to a luncheon invitation because it's on a piece of his stationary.

Berryman is hurrying to see artist / explorer Alexander Iacolevff who had worked on a story about Vietnam for them in 1935. Presumably he was back in the States by the beginning of the year, because Berryman's dated his cartoon to March 15, 1935 for a lunch on the 18th. Here's one of the artworks Iacolevff did at the time. Here's a painting that National Geographic used to own before they auctioned off a good bit of their patrimony in 2012, including more by him, and paintings (plural for both) by NC Wyeth, and dinosaur artist Charles Knight, and a lot of famous photographs. Browse the whole list here. They made $3,776,587 before selling themselves to Fox a few years later.

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