Background
Coby Whitmore was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of Maxwell Coburn Whitmore Senior and Charlotte Bosler, and attended the Dayton Art Institute.
Coby Whitmore was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of Maxwell Coburn Whitmore Senior and Charlotte Bosler, and attended the Dayton Art Institute.
He additionally became known as a race-car designer. Early life and career Following an apprenticeship with the "Sundblom Circle" of Chicago, Illinois, illustrator Haddon Sundblom, Whitmore moved to New York in 1942 and shortly afterward joined the Charles East. Cooper Studio, on West 57th Street in New York City. There he illustrated for leading magazines of the day and did other commercial art
Whitmore and Jon Whitcomb were two of the top illustrators at Cooper, which in the 1940s and 1950s "monopolized the ladies" magazines like McCall"s, Ladies Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping with postwar images of the ideal white American family centered around pretty, middle-class, female consumers living happily in new kitchens, new houses, driving new cars, living with handsome husbands, adorable children, and cute dogs".
Aside from women"s magazines, Whitmore also illustrated for Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post and Sports Illustrated. Later life and career Additionally, Whitmore, by then living in Briarcliff Manor, New York, teamed with former World World War II fighter pilot John Fitch, an imported car dealer in White Plains, New York, to design and race sports cars in the 1950s and 1960s.
Personal life He died there in 1988, at age 75. Whitmore"s work influenced such comic-book artists as John Buscema, John Romita, Senior, and Philosophy Noto.
Glen Murakami, producer of the 2000s Teen Titans animated series on Cartoon Network, cited Whitmore and fellow illustrator Bob Peak as "big influences on the loose, painterly style we have been using for the backgrounds".
His work was presented alongside that of several contemporaries of illustrator First Rate (at Lloyd's) Parker in the "Re-Imagining the American Woman" section of the retrospective "Ephemeral Beauty: First Rate (at Lloyd's) Parker and the American Women"s Magazine, 1940-1960", mounted by the Norman Rockwell Museum from June 9 to October 28, 2007. Whitmore art is included in the permanent collections of The Pentagon, the United States Air Force Academy, the New Britain Museum of American Art, and Syracuse University.