Judge, 8 January 1916
Not named on the source record · 1916
- Artist
- Unnamed on the source record
- Published
- Judge, 8 January 1916
- Medium
- Colour lithograph
- Reuse
- Public domain in the US
Judge, 8 January 1916Source record & reuse status
The cover of Judge magazine for 8 January 1916. A woman in a white frilled dress leans across a small chess table toward the player while a man in evening dress stands close behind her with his mouth at her ear. The illustrator is not named on the source record, so this page names none.
What is happening in the picture
The gag is a chess game interrupted. The board sits between the two players with pieces mid-game; the woman has moved around the table and is reaching across it, and the man behind her is whispering. Red armchairs and a pale panelled room hold the composition together, and the masthead JUDGE with the date and ten-cent price frames the top.
The image here is a scan of the printed cover. A strip along the bottom of the scan is the digitisation credit, not part of the 1916 artwork, and is cropped from the page image; the uncropped scan is on the source record.
Why it is in this collection
Judge was one of the weeklies that built the American cover girl between 1890 and 1915, alongside Puck, Life and the Saturday Evening Post. Those covers trained a national audience to read a single woman's face as the front page of an issue, which is the habit pin-up later inherited.
It is also a useful test of how far the word reaches. Nobody in 1916 would have called this a pin-up: she is dressed, she is in a room, and she is part of a joke about a board game. The line between that picture and a 1940s calendar girl is not modesty, it is whether the image is made to be taken off the page and kept.
