John Alan Maxwell (March 7, 1904 – April 13, 1984) was an American artist known primarily for his book and magazine illustrations, as well as historical paintings.
Maxwell worked as a soda jerk in a drug store while attending Science Hill High School in Johnson City.
One of his other teachers was noted book and magazine illustrator Frank Vincent DuMond,[2] whose students also included Georgia O'Keeffe and Norman Rockwell.
[5] By the early 1930s, Maxwell was illustrating for such noted writers as Christopher Morley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Pearl S. Buck[6] and Edna Ferber.
An illustration signed by Maxwell for the official theater poster for Ernest Hemingway's 1943 film For Whom the Bell Tolls, was sold on eBay in March, 2011.
For the Doubleday Doran & Company, Maxwell illustrated a 1929 United States edition of The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy, the British novelist, playwright and artist.
John Alan Maxwell, one of today's brightest lights in the illustrating field, yearns for times past, places forgotten, a world most imaginary, popularly supposed to have been pre-Civil War Dixie.
That Maxwell should spend his efforts upon a romanticized, literary past is no less legitimate than the preoccupation of a Chirico with long sad vistas in towns that never were.
The only question we are permitted to ask is, "How far can nostalgia go without becoming the mutterings of an old man in his beer (or his bourbon) who likes to tell you, ad infinitum, about things that have ceased to interest anyone but himself, and himself only because he has nothing better to do?"
In this day of Mondrian's fiendish austerity, of Moholoy-Nagy's sometimes bleakly scientific functionalism, of Kandinsky's astral trapezoids, there is a place in art for sheer romance, for flesh over honest bones, for mysteries in hair, for odor and sound.Maxwell was a contemporary of N.C. Wyeth, an important 20th century illustrator.
Today, Maxwell's original illustrations also adorn recent reprint editions of Allan Eckert's novels, including The Frontiersmen, Wilderness Empire and The Conquerors.