Lot 32: Frederic Rodrigo Gruger (American, 1871-1953) "'I'll fill that ole burglar so full of holes that his hide will look like a sieve!'"

"'I'll fill that ole burglar so full of holes that his hide will look like a sieve!'" Illustration for L. B. Yates's "Major Miles and the Grim Reaper," Saturday Evening Post, July 18, 1914.
Signed bottom right.
Mixed media.
28.2 x 16.3cm (11 1/8 x 6 7/16in).

F. R. Gruger was one of the most admired artists of the Golden Age of American Illustration. His pictures appeared in almost every major national magazine, but he is best remembered for his long association with The Saturday Evening Post. He was the original illustrator of the serializations of Harry Leon Wilson's Ruggles of Red Gap (1915), Booth Tarkington's Seventeen (1916) and Edna Ferber's Show Boat (1926). Other writers whose work he illustrated during his long career include Bret Harte, Owen Wister, Walter D. Edmunds, P. G. Wodehouse, W. Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, John Galsworthy, Agatha Christie, Ring Lardner, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolf and William Faulkner.