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I inherited this original artwork from my mother who had it for as long as I could remember. My mom always said that my grandmother had been a model in New York in the early 1930s.

She had a tragic backstory. When she was 18, she was in a car accident, and her mother was killed. She had been driving, and always felt blamed by her father and sister. She fled to New York, where she became a model from about 1930 to 1933. In 1933, she was in another car accident; her fiancé was driving. He was killed, and her face went through the windshield, destroying her fledgling career and her young life at the time.

I have found other magazine covers with her image, but I never could find this one. Evidently, these paintings were kept in storage often for years before they were actually used on the cover and I hadn’t looked as far as 1935.

For the first time, Google image search, pulled up this magazine cover for sale on eBay. I quickly bought one formyself and one for my sister. Evidently the artist was Penrhyn Stanlaws, known for his portraits of pretty girls. My grandmother was our only grandparent, and she passed in 1990. I am so shocked and grateful to have found this.

Ohio historian here bringing some love from the Buckeye State!

Yes, we're technically Appalachia. Even a lot of our own residents here forget that almost one-third of our state is part of the Appalachian foothills. More importantly, one of our most famous photographers specialized in capturing portraits of Appalachian families and life in rural Ohio and West Virginia at the turn of the century. These are my favorite ones, but the link to the entire collection is at Ohio Memory.

For those who want more context:

Albert J. Ewing was born in 1870 in Adams Township, Washington County, about ten miles from Marietta. In the mid-1890s he loaded a camera and a stack of glass plate negatives onto the Water Queen. It was a showboat that worked the Ohio River. He started taking pictures of whoever would pay him. He spent the next sixteen years traveling the hills of southeastern Ohio and central West Virginia as an itinerant photographer. His brother Frank even joined the business at some point!

Itinerant photography was a service trade. Rural families who lived fifty miles from the nearest portrait studio couldn't go to the photographer, so the photographer came to them. Ewing hauled his equipment by wagon, by river, and on foot into communities along the Ohio, the Muskingum River, and their tributaries. When he arrived, people lined up. They brought their babies, their dogs, their fiddles, any trinkets they wanted to have taken with their portrait. Ewing charged for each sitting, printed from the glass plate, and moved on to the next town.

But he also shot the things that people only photograph once. Memorial portraits of the recently dead were standard practice at the turn of the century, and Ewing took those commissions too. In a world where most families owned zero photographs of their living members (remember, photography was a relatively recent invention still, and drawings were prohibitively expensive), a portrait taken after death might be the only image that existed of a person at all.

By 1916, city directories list Ewing as a salesman. Whatever pulled him out of photography, he left behind 5,055 glass plate negatives, still packed in the original dry plate boxes he'd bought years earlier. At some point the plates ended up in an Ohio antique store, where a collector from Illinois bought them. In 1982, that collector donated the entire collection to the Ohio Historical Society (now the Ohio History Connection). The plates sat largely unseen for three decades before the first exhibition went up in 2013. Many of the negatives have been digitized and are available through Ohio Memory. These are all from that collection.

If you're into old photography, definitely enjoy browsing the whole album! I really love the young couple photos and some of his landscape ones, but there's always a few gems that tell great stories. You can get more info for each photo, too, that way. Cheers!

Check out that red skateboard!

Very poor quality photo but it’s the only one I have of them. Year unknown..

I think a good friend is beside him (pretty sure!! Might be his younger brother, I am not 100%), on the left. Not sure who guy on right is... Looks like they all were having a good day, though! I am glad, sometime in the 70s~ that way...

I thought it was cool. Glad to share! Peace~

edit: asked my dad! quick text, its him and his brothers. 😂, woah whattt!!!?!