John Albert Coughlin was born January 22, 1885 in Chicago, Illinois. His father was Cornelius C. Coughlin, an Irish American grocer who was born in Illinois. His mother was Mary McClary of Ireland. He was their first born. They lived at 93 Delaware Street.
In 1900 he took a two-year course at the University of Notre Dame, which is only eighty miles East of Chicago, and which was serviced by eight different railroad lines. Along with regular business skills, he also took classes in drawing and painting from Jobson Emilien Paradis, who was a former pupil of Gerome. In 1902 he was awarded a Commercial Diploma.
He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1903 to 1906 and graduated in 1906. His first assignments were for advertisements in Chicago periodicals.
In 1913 he married his wife Walletta and they moved to New York City, where he opened an art studio at 880 West 181st Street in Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan. The building was on the corner with Riverside Drive, so it had a spectacular view of the Hudson River. This was decades before construction began on the George Washington Bridge, so sunlight filled his art studio without obstruction.
In 1913 he painted his first pulp cover assignments for Street & Smith's The Popular Magazine. He also painted covers for Harper's Weekly that same year.
In 1914 he illustrated the book The Brown Mouse by Herbert Quick, editor of Farm and Fireside Magazine, and he also painted several covers for People's Magazine.
He painted the April 24, 1915 cover of The Saturday Evening Post. In October of that same year he created the pulp cover for the first issue of Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine, and he went on to create almost all of the covers for this same title over the next twenty years.
In 1917, he painted a notable recruitment poster for the U.S. Marines. That same year his son, John Albert Coughlin, Jr. was born.
On September 12, 1918 he reported for draft registration. He was thirty-three years old, tall, medium build, with grey-blue eyes and black hair.
Besides The Popular and Detective Story, he also sold freelance pulp covers to Argosy, Complete Stories, Detective Fiction Weekly, Detective Tales, Real Western, Short Stories, Top-Notch, and Wild West Weekly.
He did not serve in WWII, because he was fifty-seven years old in 1942.
After the war he had an art studio in College Point, Queens, where his next-door neighbor was the famous sculptor Hermon MacNeil.
John A. Coughlin died at age eighty in January of 1965.
© David Saunders 2009 |
