What is a
pin-up?
A definition, the difference between a pin-up and a portrait, and the forms the image took between 1898 and 1950.
A pin-up is an image printed to be cut out and attached to a wall. The word describes what the picture is for, not how it is drawn. Pin-ups are usually photographs or illustrations of an attractive person, most often a woman, and they are made for a mass audience that will keep the image. A magazine cover that stays in a bag is not a pin-up; the same figure painted for a calendar that hangs in a workshop is.
The short answers
| What is a pin-up? | A pin-up is an image printed to be cut out and attached to a wall. The word describes what the picture is for, not how it is drawn. Pin-ups are usually photographs or illustrations of an attractive person, most often a woman, and they are made for a mass audience that will keep the image. A magazine cover that stays in a bag is not a pin-up; the same figure painted for a calendar that hangs in a workshop is. |
|---|---|
| What makes an image a pin-up rather than a portrait? | Three things. It is reproduced in quantity. It is designed to work alone, out of the page or advertisement that carried it. And the subject is aware of being looked at: the pose, the smile and the angle of the head answer a viewer who is not in the picture. A portrait records a specific person for a specific patron; a pin-up is built to be taken away by strangers. |
| Is pin-up the same as glamour photography? | No, though the two overlap after about 1930. Glamour photography is a way of making a picture. Pin-up is a way of distributing one. Studio portraits by Frank Powolny at 20th Century Fox are both: made as publicity photographs, then reproduced and pinned up until the photograph stopped being publicity and became a thing in its own right. |
| What is nose art? | Nose art is a picture painted on the nose or fuselage of a military aircraft, usually by the crew or a designated artist, often copied from a printed pin-up. The example in this collection is a pin-up figure painted inside an oval on the cowling of a P-47D-28 fighter with the name Rough and Ready; the source record identifies the painted figure as a copy of a Gil Elvgren illustration. It is the clearest evidence that these images were meant to leave the page. |
| Are pin-up images public domain? | The ones on this site are public domain in the United States, either because they were published before 1931 or because copyright was not renewed. That is not the same as worldwide freedom to reuse: copyright runs for different terms in different countries, and some of these artists died in the twentieth century. Each page names its source record, and the reuse status on that record is what this site relies on. |
| Who are the artists named on this site? | Harrison Fisher (1875-1934), Enoch Bolles (1883-1976), Edward Mason Eggleston, Gil Elvgren (1914-1980), Frank Powolny at 20th Century Fox, RKO Pictures and the Bain News Service. Life dates are given only where the record supports them: two of these names are widely circulated with wrong dates, which is discussed on the makers page. |
Four forms, four jobs
The same woman appears in this collection in four different containers, and each container changed what the picture had to do.
| Form | Example here | What it had to do |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly cover | Judge, 8 January 1916 (1916), Puck Christmas (1898) | Be readable from across a shop and carry a joke. |
| Magazine cover, colour | Film Fun, July 1927 and Film Fun, October 1927 (1927) | One figure, one accent colour, one line of type. |
| Calendar print | A Day in June (1932) | Hang on a wall for twelve months. |
| Studio photograph | Betty Grable at RKO (1935), Betty Grable (1943) | Be printed in quantity and sent to theatres. |
| Reference photograph | Anchors A-Wow, reference photo (1950) | Hold a pose still long enough to paint from it. |
Where to go next
The history page walks the same objects in date order from 1898 to 1950. The makers page lists who drew and photographed them, including two attributions that are commonly repeated with the wrong life dates.