Talk:William Rose (illustrator)

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Yoninah (talk) 00:39, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

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Citizen Kane

• ... that although William Rose illustrated several dozen film posters for RKO Pictures, only a fraction—including an alternate Citizen Kane poster (pictured)—have been attributed to him by name? Sources: Rebello & Allen 1988, p. 327; Mendez 2003, p. 79 (those both link to the refs in the article itself. The former is an offline print book by two film historians, which I own, while the latter is an online PDF magazine article referring to the print book.)
  • ALT1:... that illustrator William Rose's alternate poster for Citizen Kane (pictured) was intended to market the film as an accessible romance? Sources: Rebello & Allen 1988, pp. 202–203; Halperin & Cantu 2009, pp. 78–79 (the first source here is the aforementioned book, the second is an online PDF magazine article by two professional auctioneers. They say virtually the same thing.)

• Reviewed: Brewer (John Updike)

Created by Brandt Luke Zorn (talk). Self-nominated at 09:38, 22 January 2020 (UTC).

• Interesting creaions, on good sources, subscription sources accepted AGF, no copyvio obvopis. The image is lecense and almost a must. I like the ALT slightly better, for smoothe reading, but if a longer hook is wanted, to match the image or for balance, the other is also fine. I trust that you will fix minor ref errors, #19 and #21 not defined, and one not used (Rosenkrantz, possibly the 21). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:56, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

• Thank you Gerda! I've fixed the ref errors you found. Appreciate your sharp and thorough eye. I've pitched ALT2, a variation on the first hook. I tweaked the sentence structure to make it more readable (using "but" in the middle of the sentence instead of "although" at the beginning). I also swapped "RKO Pictures" for the more familiar "Classical Hollywood", which I believe'll signify to a broader audience. Let me know what you think. I'd prefer for that fact to be the hook; it hews closer to one of the most noteworthy central facts about poster illustrators from this time, which is almost total anonymity and lack of recognition as artists.

ALT2: ... that William Rose illustrated dozens of film posters of the Classical Hollywood era, but only a fraction—including an alternate poster for Citizen Kane (pictured)—have been attributed to him by name? -—BLZ · talk 18:54, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I love it! (Brought it down here, for sequence of signatures. - I have no sharp eyes, just a good tool for harv errors. Thank you for the article! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:06, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:William Rose (illustrator)/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Usernameunique (talk · contribs) 20:59, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Lead

William F. Rose — Have you been unable to discover his middle name? That's right. I'm quite certain his middle initial is "F.", and he is sometimes identified by the name "William F. Rose" rather than "William Rose", but no source that I've found has given his middle name. It may be lost to time, or at least to reliable secondary sources, but if I find it I would certainly incorporate it. Why is note 1 needed? Distilled, it seems to say "a certain piece of information in included in one source, but not in others"; given that the source with the date of death is cited in "Personal life and death," it's unclear what the footnote is doing. I wanted to note the discrepancy to avoid potential confusion for any future editors/researchers. Given the scarcity of sources about Rose's life, I wanted to make it clear that the obituary trumps the other two sources since those sources would normally be considered highly reliable, even definitive, especially considering they were published years after his death. I wasn't even sure I would find an obituary at all when I went searching for it; it wasn't original research or anything, a newspaper obituary is a clearcut reliable secondary source, but I had to put in a ton of legwork to track it down and even then it's stuck behind a subscription paywall. That said, I've removed the note from the lead because it was too prominently placed for an explanatory digression. Now the footnote is only in the infobox. In that case the note might be better off in the body of the article, at "Personal life and death", than in the infobox. For that matter, the infobox doesn't really need the cite for Rose's date of birth, either. Generally speaking, an infobox is for bare facts devoid of nuance, and including a detailed note about sources is the complete opposite of that. Armed as you are with a contemporaneous obituary, there's no reason to not feel confident about the date of death, so to the extent a footnote is needed, it may as well be put in the thick of the article. I think that makes sense—although, on further consideration, you were probably right in the first place that it isn't strictly necessary anyway. I've removed the note.

Early life and education
Are any details from the time between birth and college known? None that I've been able to track down. Even the few details of his college life—beyond the basic fact of where he studied—were pieces of info I came across fairly late in the writing process.

Career and artwork

The first paragraph or two should summarize the most significant parts of Rose's career—where he worked, what he primarily did, etc.—whereas right now, they largely serve as a repository for mention of the things other than film poster illustration that Rose did. It also jumps around significantly; it begins 15 years after the end of the preceding section, and then quickly leaps forward another decade. As it is, I think the other things (magazines, paperbacks, etc.) are somewhat underdeveloped in the article. But if they are less significant that Rose's posters, then they should be mentioned in a section following "Film posters," and the "Career and artwork" section should give a brief summary of Rose's full career. What about something like this (with appropriate citations) as the second paragraph of this section? The majority of Rose's output consisted of illustrations for movie posters, paperback books, and magazines; his work in the former territory is best recorded and, to collectors today, most valuable. Rose's magazine work, to the extent it is known, included illustrations for such publications as The American Magazine, Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Today's Woman, Woman, Woman's Day, and the nationally syndicated Sunday magazines This Week and The American Weekly. In the paperback arena, he produced cover art for such publishers as Avon, Cardinal Edition, Dell, Permabooks, Pocket Books, Pyramid Books, and Ace Books. --Usernameunique (talk) 05:11, 15 April 2020 (UTC) Looks good; I incorporated a version of that. —BLZ · talk 22:02, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Film posters

with pastel and watercolor — should it be pastels and watercolors? When referring to the type of paint as a medium, "pastel" and "watercolor" can be uncountable nouns. You're right that it was somewhat awkward as written, and I revised it; it should either be "in pastel and watercolor" (uncountable media of paint) or "with pastels and watercolors" (countable materials), so I made it the former. There's some general inconsistency in when noir is italicized or not. I've unitalicized in all instances. Rose became a pioneer of noir's visual conventions in his illustrations for Hollywood film noir posters — Suggest rephrasing; this uses "noir" as shorthand for "film noir" before the full phrase is used in the body of the article. I ended up scrapping and replacing this sentence; upon rereading, the cited source listed Rose among several illustrators of the time who were most influential in defining the visual look of Hollywood genres, but it did not identify his influence on noir or any genre in particular. You might want to look at the paragraph about the Cat People poster and Rose's bold style, which I've toyed with a fair amount, to ensure that it still seems correct. I liked your revisions and I incorporated several of the changes you made. I ended up restructuring and significantly revising the whole section. I originally intended the critical assessments to be sorted in roughly two groups: those describing Rose's genre-defining imagery, and those describing his genre-defying imagery. Can you add the date for each poster/movie mentioned in this section? Done. You might check to ensure you are using logical quotation; I'm noticing a few punctuation marks within the quotation marks that look as if they should be outside. You might still look at this: see WP:LQ. But it's more an issue for FAC, should you nominate this there, than it is for here. --Usernameunique (talk) 04:40, 15 April 2020 (UTC) Admittedly this area of punctuation rules is one of my weaker areas of copyediting, something I haven't internalized so that it's intuitive. I've made some revisions based on my reading of those rules; feel free to fix any mistakes you find and I'll check those out. —BLZ · talk 22:02, 16 April 2020 (UTC) Yes, it took me a while to get a grasp on that too. Never even knew it was a thing until it was pointed out to me at FAC. --Usernameunique (talk) 02:10, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Valuation

There's a lot about his paperback works here, but this work is barely mentioned above. Is there enough information in the sources to build a separate section on his paperback illustrations? What about his paintings for magazines? The Papillon Gallery source suggests that these Rose was also well known for these. See my comment below your "Overall" comment. Even though they didn't sell as well (e.g., $87.50), what about including some of the magazine prices as well? Just to give the sense that there is a real range. Alternatively, another option would be to just include footnotes next to those illustrations that have sold, noting the sale date and price. --Usernameunique (talk) 05:14, 15 April 2020 (UTC) Added. —BLZ · talk 22:02, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

List of known film poster illustrations

Are these all you have been able to find, or is it a curated list? The list includes every poster for which I was able to find a reliable attribution. There is no definitive or complete list of his works, at least not in any reasonably accessible secondary sources, which includes a few rare-ish offline-only sources like Reel Art. I'm not quite sure I get what you meant by "curated", but I haven't left anything out (except for attributions that were vague, categorically unreliable, etc). Sounds good, and makes sense to me. By "curated," I meant to ask whether you were making judgment calls about what should or should not be included (based on a desire to conserve space in the article, the aesthetic value of the posters, etc.); but I think your approach, which is to include everything than can reliably be traced back to Rose, is the right one. Ahh I gotcha. Right, I didn't do any kind of grooming based on aesthetic preference or desire to conserve space—as long as I felt I'd found sufficiently reliable confirmation, it's listed. How many of his paperback/magazine illustrations are known? See my comment below your "Overall" comment.

Sources

You should clip the newspapers.com articles and link to them instead of the full page; that way everyone can access them, with or without an account. Oh! I wasn't aware that was a possibility. How do you do that? Regrettably, I've suspended my subscription to tighten my belt for COVID-related economic reasons... Is it possible without a subscription? Do you have a subscription? Just clipped them for you; in the future, look for the button near the top right of each newspaper marked "Clip," with the image of a pair of scissors. That's a sensible, if unfortunate, cutback. Happily, however, you may not need to resubscribe personally; The Wikipedia library has a number of available subscriptions, which newspapers.com donates. That's how I have mine, and hopefully you can put in for one as well. --Usernameunique (talk) 01:19, 8 April 2020 (UTC) – via HA.com — These aren't needed, since Heritage Auctions is already in the citations. Some of the other "via"s aren't strictly speaking necessary either, but are more arguable. I added these partly for my own organization (to distinguish the print Heritage Auctions sources like magazines and books from the web-only ones), but also to have a place to put the "registration required" notice, since not all of the cited info is freely accessible. Mendez, A. E. — Are you able to figure out the first name? This is the only source with initials rather than the full first name. No clue what his name is, and regardless it seems like this writer used these initials as his professional name.

Overall

• Interesting article, BLZ. It would be nice to see a standalone section about his non-poster work; other than that, the comments above are pretty minor. --Usernameunique (talk) 20:59, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Thank you! Regarding his paperback/magazine illustrations: at some point I started trying to track down reliable attributions of these illustrations just as I had done for his posters, and I think I have those notes saved in a text file somewhere. I'll be able to take a look at it later tonight or tomorrow. —BLZ · talk 23:35, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

@Usernameunique: I've added a "List of book covers attributed to Rose" section. It follows the same principle as the posters section: as long as I could find a sufficiently reliable source attributing a book's cover to Rose, I've listed it. Some notes on sourcing:

• As with his poster art, there is no definitive "master list" out there of Rose's book cover artwork, so every book was listed on a case-by-case basis.
• Whenever possible I cited a traditional secondary source like a bibliography or a reliable web article.
• In some cases I found attribution to Rose in a WorldCat listing, so I've directly cited those OCLC numbers. It would be needlessly cumbersome to cite them Harv-style like the other sources ("WorldCat n.d.(a)", "WorldCat n.d.(b)", and so on).
• In some cases I cited a bookseller, since a listing from a professional bookseller is about as trustworthy an indicator that they have a physical copy of the book as there can be. To ensure reliability, I only cited booksellers who sell via their own website or, in one case, I cited a listing at AbeBooks by a seller listed as a "Heritage Bookseller", i.e. a seller who meets some internal standards like duration of time selling through the site, and thus is not just some random person doing a digital garage sale.

• Personally, I don't have an issue with this. But I think you can be more specific, because it's clear the book seller is taking that information from the back cover. When that's the case (I saw it for another source that I clicked on, and there may be some more), I think you could cite the book itself, with the harv citation being something like {{sfn|Murray|1958|loc=back cover}}. I suspect that would also save you a headache at FAC (again, should you pursue that route). --Usernameunique (talk) 04:44, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

• I'm OK doing this would be OK in cases where the scan itself provides the credit or signature, but I feel like it's a stretch if the credit is solely coming from a caption provided by the uploader. They may be relaying a credit from inside the book, but they may also be making their own identification based on art style or parroting what they read on someone else's blog. —BLZ · talk 02:54, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

• Makes sense to me. --Usernameunique (talk) 05:17, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

• I don't actually have access to Lyles 1983, a book called Dell Paperbacks, 1942 to Mid-1962: A Catalog-index. This is why I didn't cite to any actual page numbers and why I cited an alternate source as backup verification whenever one was available. I can't find the book available online anywhere except in a blind, search-only mode via HathiTrust Digital Library—for obvious reasons, this has limited utility. A search for the exact phrase "William Rose" pulls up 13 hits on HathiTrust, which is the same number of Dell covers I've attributed to him.
• For a few of the covers, I only cite Lyles 1983. In these cases I was only able to verify Rose's authorship of a Dell book cover using an informal source like a blog or a Flickr user's scan. For example, here's a scan of The Frightened Wife, a Dell Book, with a caption that credits Rose as the author. Note that this Flickr post would be good enough to upload the cover to Wikipedia (or Commons, if it's public domain) and attribute it to Rose on the file page, but it's not good enough to cite as a reliable source for article content because of its reliance on information provided by the uploaders' caption. When I could only verify Rose's authorship of a non-Dell book through Flickr (e.g. this scan of City Limits by Nick Marino), I left it off the list. My reasoning for citing Lyles 1983 is that it's a definitive resource that could be used to disprove the attribution, and I assume that many of the informal attributions on blogs or Flickr rely on resources like Lyles's bibliography. I may try to access a library copy after quarantine is over, but even then that may take some time as it does not seem to be commonly held.

• Makes sense to me, and I would definitely look for a copy once quarantine is over. Hathitrust has it scanned, and is temporarily allowing some institutions online access, so maybe that could provide a method once they get their system in place. As for Flickr, I bet you most of those attributions are coming from the back cover—something to keep in mind to look for if you can (e.g., maybe there are eBay listing that include pictures of the back cover as well). --Usernameunique (talk) 04:54, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

• I couldn't find a reasonably reliable source to attribute any specific Avon cover to Rose. It's the only one missing out of the seven publishers Rose is known to have worked for. According to a scan on Flickr, Rose illustrated an Avon edition of The Four of Hearts by Ellery Queen. However, unlike with Dell books, I don't know of any offline source out there that could be used to prove or disprove Rose's authorship and, as such, I've left it off the list.

• That one's signed by Rose on the front cover—right next to the fingers on the woman's left hand. --Usernameunique (talk) 04:59, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

• Ah, I see that now—and based on this eBay listing, that's probably the only credit on the book itself, so unless a ridiculously comprehensive Avon/Queen bibliography turns up the cover itself seems to be the best and only source. I've added it to the list.

I've also added a list of magazine illustrations, as I stumbled across a source (Stephensen-Payne n.d.) with a partial list of these works. In one case here, I have cited a scan on Flickr; unlike the book cover scans, this scan actually shows Rose's illustration credit in the scan itself, not just in the uploader's caption. It's as if I'm citing the magazine article directly, with Flickr acting as a conduit, as I'm not relying on any aspect of the Flickr.

One last thing, regarding your comment above about the intro paragraphs in the "Career and artwork" section: the reason it is presented that way is due to the imbalance of sources discussing Rose's poster work vs. the rest of his work. If there were enough content to develop even a one-paragraph subsection dedicated to Rose's illustrations for books and magazines, I would make one. However, there is hardly any writing about that side of his work beyond mentioning that it exists, with no critical commentary at all from what I've found.

Let me know what you think. I wanted to explain all of the sourcing here because it was unusually complicated and I wanted to make it easier for you to see what I cited, and why, without having to work backwards and pick it all apart yourself. —BLZ · talk 21:22, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanations, BLZ. I think we're in reasonably good shape here, just a few lingering comments above—none of which are critical, in any event. You might also consider adding some sample magazine illustrations, by the way. Very impressive work building out those paperback/magazine listings so quickly. At some point (not now), you might think about whether they warrant a standalone article (e.g., Herbert Maryon and Works of Herbert Maryon). --Usernameunique (talk) 05:19, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Most of his magazine work almost certainly remains under copyright, as magazine publishers were typically more systematic about renewing the copyright status of their pre-1964 work. However, I did find that his illustrations for The American Magazine and The American Weekly have become public domain, so there is now a small gallery. —BLZ · talk 22:02, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

That's a good point, BLZ, although the selection you added looks good. Any thoughts on the remaining comment above (beginning "Personally, I don't have an issue with this...")? --Usernameunique (talk) 02:18, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

BLZ, nice work on this all around. Passing now. --Usernameunique (talk) 18:01, 17 April 2020 (UTC)