Mid Century Golden Age of Illustration- Narrative Art - Norman Rockwell School

“Graduation Day” is emblematic of mid-century American Illustration.
But the real story of this storytelling work is that it embodies the lost art of portrait painting and graphic design.
Alex Ross borrows on the classical tradition and flaunts his skills as a narrative painter. In “Graduation Day”, he paints a complex composition involving at least thirteen portraits. The subjects are beautifully rendered and lit. They are set against a dark grey background and jump off the surface at the viewer. The composition is complexly designed. The future graduate in the red jacket engaging with a girl photographer is a compositional device that leads the viewer's eye to the main subject - a father congratulating his son on graduating from medical school. Creating art that relies on facial expressions and body gestures is a talent absent in contemporary art. Why? It’s very hard to do and takes years and training and practice to get it right. Despite Alex Ross's folksy subject matter, this work is a high example of naturalism and representation by an important member of the Golden Age of American Illustration.
Signed lower right

Born in the town of Dunfermline, Scotland, Alexander Sharpe Ross (1908-1990) moved with his family to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1911. After attending Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University), Ross moved to New York and joined the Charles E. Cooper Studio, where he worked among such notable illustrators as Ward Brackett, Stevan Dohanos, J. Frederick Smith, and Jon Whitcomb.

Good Housekeeping magazine frequently featured Ross's artwork on their covers throughout the 1940s, while Ross was also completing commissions for some of the most popular magazines of the day, including The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, McCall's, Collier's, Woman's Home Companion, and Reader's Digest.

During the decline of magazine illustration in the mid-1960s, Ross turned from romantic magazine illustrations to fine art using watercolor, for which he won many awards. - From Illustration History - Norman Rockwell Museum