Collier’s Automobile Section, January 1914 - Edward Penfield Art Print / Canvas

Edward Penfield anchors this Collier's Automobile Section for January 10, 1914 on a motorist caught mid-repair, his hand lifting riding gloves to a wool scarf wound tight against a winter chill.

Behind him a canary-yellow touring car sits with its hood thrown open, the steering column and hand-crank fittings exposed like an anatomy lesson in early motoring machinery. His mackinaw coat, patterned in tangerine and chalk-white stepped diamonds borrowed from Southwestern trade-blanket design, buttons over a houndstooth driving cap and knee-laced chestnut boots built for mud and ice.

Penfield, the Harper's-trained poster illustrator who shaped Collier's Progressive Era covers, sets the whole scene against plain cream stock and lets one black silhouette carry the decade's romance with the open road.

Above him the masthead's burnt-orange initial cap and the five-cent price tag frame a magazine promising Ewing Galloway's essay on good roads inside. One man, one stalled engine, and the whole optimism of 1914 American automobile culture caught before the crank turns over. Both a story and a manifesto for the automobile age.