Illustrator and landscape painter John Newton Howitt (1885-1958) was born in White Plains, New York. His is the classic case of an artist torn between the divergent worlds of commercial and fine art and between what he considered the higher and lower levels of commercial illustration. After a successful career in major magazine illustration, he was forced by the Depression to paint for the pulp magazines, which activity he disliked intensely. He would return, at the beginning of World War II, to magazines such as Colliers and Liberty, and to his landscape painting, but, ironically, it is his illustrations of the pulps for which he is most remembered.

When, at the age of four, Howitt fell ill with polio, his father drew ...