1910 - 1982

John Phillip Falter was born in Plattsmouth, Nebraska although the family homestead was in Atchison, Kansas. He started his illustration career rather young, selling his first artwork in 1930 to Liberty, a pulp magazine. The Liberty magazine commission gave him the exposure he needed to gain other clients, including: Gulf Oil Company, Four Roses Whiskey, and Arrow Shirts. His career flourished from pulp magazines forward until he became one of the most noted illustrators for the most notable magazine in the nation, the Saturday Evening Post.

John Falter studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute and later moved to New York to “get the right exposure and make career contacts,” matriculating at the Art Students League. He later attended classes at the Grand Central School of Art and studied under George Wright (1873-1951), an illustrator for The Century, Harper’s,  Scribner’s, and the Saturday Evening Post. Wright was a fine role model for this young artist for before becoming an illustrator he was a reporter and was therefore quite strict in teaching students to make a plentiful number of studies and to organize well in advance of starting their illustrative works. Wright drummed these lessons into Falter. Wright also believed in sketching profusely to show clients all the possible ideas in hand, and then to get a better grasp on what the client expected for the final artwork. Likewise, Falter took the lessons well and did the same. He is reputed to have shown Ken Stuart, Art Editor for the Post, a series of sketch ideas for a cover, with Stuart remarking, “If the idea is right, it takes only a few simple lines for one artist to explain it to another.”

He went on to illustrate 47 books for Reader’s Digest and 187 covers for the Saturday Evening Post. Interestingly and prophetically his businessman father, George H. Falter, had once said “You won’t be an artist son, until you’ve put a cover on the Saturday Evening Post.” Over his many years with the Post, John Falter painted more than 200 covers, mostly with scenes he experienced as a youth growing up in Nebraska and Kansas. He also was a portrait artist and had the opportunity to paint jazz idols such as Louis Armstrong and Art Tatum. He delighted in adding images of real

people into his compositions, sometimes including himself. It seemed to arouse some furor on occasion and it also aroused a great amount of interest similar to that of the cartoonist Al Hirschfeld’s lettering of his daughter’s name, ‘Nina’ hidden away on an image. The viewers searched for Falter’s image, usually with a pipe, standing in a crowd waiting to be found out. In his later years, he painted portraits of a number of famous people, although not for magazines, they included actress Olivia De Havilland, actor James Cagney, and his former Admiral Halsey. One theme prominent throughout his works is his love for America.

In World War II, Falter joined the Navy as a chief boatswain’s mate and was soon commissioned as “lieutenant with special art duties”, when it was learned where his work had been published. During his seventy-two years, his paintings depicted a wide range of themes from episodes of American history such as ‘Charging San Juan Hill’ to ‘Country Boy and Collie’, which was reminiscent of his childhood. He illustrated special locales across America from the ‘Golden Gate Bridge’ to ‘Gramercy Park’. He once said, "If you are not in love with what you are trying to put on canvas, you had better quit."

Just before his passing, Falter was working on a series depicting the American migration experience.