A bit more on Hugh Rankin

(N.B. that I am indebted for this post to David Saunders’s post on Hugh Rankin at The Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists. The article contains its own small trove of Hugh Rankin’s art (see the links on the left-hand side of the page, and for both that and the article I recommend your visiting.)

Our boy Hugh (officially named Hugh Dearborn Copp) did his share of sexy covers for Weird Tales, many of them somewhat earlier than Margaret Brundage’s run. This one, for example, from August 1929:

As noted in yesterday’s post, Hugh’s mother Ellen Rankin Copp was a distinguished American sculptor, and herself the granddaughter prominent abolitionists and Underground Railroad “conductors” Jean (1795-1877) and John Rankin (1793-1886). Quite the American family! Mrs. Copp designed a 25-foot tall sculpture of the Hawaiian fire goddess Pele for the Hawaii pavilion at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition.

Though only fourteen himself, Hugh ” sculpted a charming panel of Pixies and Brownies in a hurdle race, which was accepted by the Board of Lady Managers of the World’s Fair and exhibited in the Childrens’ Pavilion.” Mother and son were, in their way, nationally celebrated figures.

Dig even a little and history becomes more fascinating than we have a right to.

That unfortunate trope again

A white woman somehow menaced by a sinister-looking Oriental is one of the more unfortunate tropes common in the pulp era, but Margaret Brundage did make use of it in an early Weird Tales cover (December 1933). I suppose I’m fair game for reproducing it here, but I hold to the view that we don’t make ourselves wiser in the present by blotting out parts of our past.

(I confess to be unusually pleased at seeing the little blue NRA eagle in the upper left-hand corner of the cover. We do our part!

In the interior, Hugh Rankin (1878-1956) provides a little tasty cheesecake to go along with Frank Owen’s story “The Ox-Cart.”

“Her glowing silver body was a gem of rarest worth.”

A biographical detail which caught my eye and which I’ll probably post more on tomorrow is that Hugh Rankin was the son of Ellen Rankin Copp (1853-1901), a pioneering American woman sculptor.

This issue of Weird Tales is available to read and download at the Internet Archive.