The Other Side by Dean Cornwell: The Man the Telegram Had Buried (1918)
What happens when the man the telegram has already buried is still standing in the room? In Dean Cornwell’s The Other Side (1918), the answer is a dream. A nurse named Mary sees Ronald, missing and believed killed, and the illustrator turns that second into a winged embrace set under the war. The wings take most of the sheet. The figure in her arms is the smaller thing. The picture is not a battle. It is the moment after the battle has been declared over, and one person refuses the declaration.
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Artist: Dean Cornwell (1892–1960)
Title: The Other Side
Date: 1918
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 34½ × 25½ in. (87.6 × 64.8 cm)
Collection: Kelly Collection of American Illustration
Subject: Illustration for a First World War story by F. Britten Austin: Mary dreams of Ronald, missing and believed killed
Status: Original painting in the Kelly Collection.
A dream with a name
Cornwell did not invent the reunion. He was illustrating a story. F. Britten Austin’s nurse, Mary, dreams of Ronald while the lists still have him as missing, and as dead. The illustrator’s job in 1918 was to make a magazine page stop a reader who had already seen too many casualty lists. He does it by refusing the usual war picture. There is no trench, no charge, no stretcher in the foreground. There is an embrace, and wings large enough to cover it.
That is why the title does two kinds of work. The other side is the far side of the fighting, the place a dream can still reach. It is also the other side of the telegram. Ronald is officially gone. In the picture he is still being held. Cornwell was twenty-six. He had come out of Louisville, through the Chicago Tribune and the Art Institute, and by 1915 he was studying with Harvey Dunn, Howard Pyle’s student. Dunn taught illustration as a story told at the size of a page. This is that lesson, used on a war that had already filled the pages.
What the sheet is doing
The wings are the composition. They open behind the two figures and take the upper half of the canvas, so the embrace reads as sheltered before it reads as romantic. The palette stays low: earth, a deep red on the held figure, a pale wing, a little gold in the dark. Nothing in the handling asks to be admired as finish. It asks to be read at the speed of a turning page.
American illustration of that year had two speeds. One was the poster, which told you to enlist or to save. The other was the story picture, which told you what the enlistment had cost at home. The Other Side is the second. The halo some viewers see on the held figure is the dream’s way of saying the man is no longer only a soldier. Cornwell does not settle whether the meeting is sleep, grief, or a death. He paints the second in which those three are the same shape.
The illustrator behind the picture
Cornwell would later be called the dean of illustrators, a pun on the name and a verdict on the career. The magazine work of the 1920s and 1930s, for Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Redbook and the rest, made him one of the highest-paid hands in American publishing. The murals came after. The Other Side is earlier than that reputation. It is a young illustrator, in the last year of the war, given a story about a woman who will not accept a missing name.
The canvas is in the Kelly Collection of American Illustration, oil on canvas, thirty-four and a half by twenty-five and a half inches. That is story size, not mural size. It was made to sit on a page opposite type. Hung on a wall, it keeps that scale. You stand close. The wings still fill the view.
For another journey through the history hidden behind a masterpiece, explore the Sapiens Verbum essays on the artists, paintings and collections that shaped European and American art.
Hang Cornwell’s The Other Side — the dream, the wings, the man the lists had already taken — as a print, canvas or poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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💬 Over to you: A dream, a death, or a man who is only missing? The picture will not choose. Which reading do you keep? Tell us in the comments.
Sources
Kelly Collection of American Illustration — collection of Golden Age illustration, 1890–1935
Smithsonian American Art Museum — Richard Kelly and the Kelly Collection, 13 May 2010
Sapiens Verbum — The Other Side, 1918, Dean Cornwell
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