Harry Barton Covers

Harry L. Barton, Jr. was born May 12, 1908 in Seattle, Washington.
He graduated Seattle's Broadway High School in 1926 and began to work as a commercial artist in a sign shop.

After marrying his wife, Pauline, in 1938 they moved to New York City.

During World War II he tried to break into freelance work for the pulp magazine industry, which was in desperate need to replace most of the pre-war talent that had been drafted.

He studied at the Art Students League in NYC, where he met Sam Cherry. Through that friendship he eventually met Ernest Chiriacka and Ralph DeSoto, all of whom provided further important art training.

In the 1950s he painted covers for Exciting Western, which was published by Thrilling Publications. He also painted covers for Argosy, which was published by Popular Publications. They had altered that magazine's conventional format in 1943 from a long-running pulp magazine to a bedsheet-sized men's adventure magazine.

Throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s he painted covers for digests and paperback books produced by Avon, Bantam, Dell, Monarch, and Pocket Books.

During the mid-1960s he illustrated a number of hardcover books produced by the Catholic Church under a company named Vision Books.

From the 1970s onward he made fine art paintings of the Old West, which he sold through Smith Gallery in New York City. His last exhibition was in 1983.

Harry Barton died at the age of ninety-three on August 12, 2001.

© David Saunders 2009

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