A Day in June
Edward Mason Eggleston · 1932
- Artist
- Edward Mason Eggleston
- Published
- Brown and Bigelow calendar print, 1932
- Medium
- Print from a painting
- Reuse
- Public domain in the US
Published as a calendar print by Brown and Bigelow, 1932Source record & reuse status
A Day in June, a 1932 print from a painting by Edward Mason Eggleston, published as a calendar print by Brown and Bigelow. A red-haired woman in a pale slip dress lies on grass in the shade of a large tree, one arm raised with a yellow butterfly on her hand, mountains lit by low sun behind her.
How the picture is built
The tree trunk carries the left edge and its canopy covers the top, so the figure is framed twice: once by shade, once by the light on the mountains. Eggleston puts the only saturated yellow in the painting on the butterfly and on the sunlit rock face, which keeps the eye moving between her hand and the horizon.
The signature sits low at the right. The print is reproduced whole, including the printed border of the calendar sheet.
Why calendar art belongs in a pin-up history
Brown and Bigelow printed these as commercial calendars sent out with advertising, which means the image was designed to be hung on a wall for twelve months. That is the literal content of the word pin-up: not a style of drawing but a distribution method, and the style grew to fit it.
Calendar pictures are also the missing step between the magazine cover and the studio photograph. The pose is more direct than a 1916 cover, the setting is still invented, and the light is doing the work that a masthead used to do.
