William Fulton Soare:

Women & Children

Much of the artist's income was from advertising, and then as now, nothing sold products as well as images of pretty girls, with the possible exception of cute babies.  Although William Soare was rather shy in his relationships with the fair sex, (he did not marry until the age of 39) he loved women, and painted them with great delight, as is revealed whimsically in his very early letters to Valdora-- before he even suspected that she was his bride-to-be!
 

"You see that annual insanity has again taken position in the  forefront of my cranium,  and in its milder demonstrations people call it 'Spring' with a  grudging tolerance. But when  I become rabid, I don't know  or care what people think.  My recklessness becomes by  spells so violent that I leave  a train of shattered dreams  and faded gardens in my wake.  Want to be around my baby...

...any baby,  all the time, moon or  no moon.  Dizzy,  depraved, delirious,  or deep and desperate,  I can't  help it.

I even went to a dance (me!), wanted to buy a canary, some  white rabbits, saw four girls  last Sunday, bought an overcoat to keep cool...

...am planning to take up fencing to give me more aggression. 

What do you think? 

I am still afraid of some girls, but they never know it. I find myself falling in love with any or all of them; thank heaven, they don't know it...

 

The very touch of her hand on mine causes lightning to go dazzling through me from head to foot. I can't see, there's a roar in my ears, and I plead headache. Subterfuge, that's all....and the world is too full of alibis already."  April 28, 1931 

One of my father's more recognizable advertising clients was Coca-Cola....
 

"Thousands,  thronging  after pleasure,  always escaping  from  themselves,  always looking  toward a  dazzling  unreality.

Thousands of  gregarious humans, surfeited with life,  trying to find  a new glint to  please their eye, 

..a new emotion to thrill them,  to help them forget their monotonous unimportance."         April 28, 1931 

The artist's market  demanded  Women  with Big Hats... 

 

..... Women for all Seasons.... 

Women exemplifying the Ideal of all-American  Motherhood.......as well as their  precocious offspring...    Surely neither of the two little bundles of joy in the adjacent panels resembles me at that age; however, my infancy inspired the following ditty from my daddy's pen: 

"I'm a skeptic, antiseptic, (not dyspeptic) little man!
All my life I've been a doubter.
If food makes gout,  then I'm a gouter.
But I take my victuals straight;
Always frolic, never colic.
Yes, I think my folks are fooling
When they criticize my drooling.
(What I need is social schooling)
I'm a skeptic, can't you see?"

Although not a specialty of this artist, some of his more scantily clad and provocative images of women might be considered "pin-up" art.  We are gratified that four of the images on this page ( Egyptian Dancer 37,  Trapeze Tease 39, above; and  Surfers 42 & 42, below) have been recently published in The Great American Pin-Up by Charles G. Martignette and Louis K. Meisel.  This handsome, slick publication from Taschen is an extensive anthology of over 900 illustrations of the genre.  My father's alluring young ladies are certainly in very good company!
 

 

"Limitless expanse of sand and surf,  flat sand bars many miles in length and six miles out at sea, and populated by strange sun-browned people who play and eat endlessly. 

 

Small cities of the sea, straight, hard yellow roads fading into a misty horizon, broken by never a tree nor hill, and lines of tall electric light poles marching endlessly in perspective, their taut strung wires a perpetual harp of the winds.

Vast reaches of desolate beach, gleaming with the incessant ebb and flow of the surf, days and nights filled with constant seething music of the sea, groups of lively little sandpipers running back and forth at the edge of the water, and the occasional cry of a sea gull or snipe.  And over all the greatest dome of heaven that can be seen from this earth." September 3, 1932 

This seascape is signed with the initials  "VJS," indicating that it is not my father's work, but my mother's, presumably painted under his patient tutelage. Although she was a highly creative writer, she did not, to my knowledge, paint any other pictures.