One more Babe Ruth vs. Rube Waddell 1917 Sports Companion thread

[BobC]

Originally Posted by bbcard1

I've spent my career in advertising (I'm 62 now)....when I was in my 20s, some of the artists who were in their 60s had what they called Swipe Files...scrapbooks of images they would trace to make drawings...they would deviate from the pic a bit here and there, but the deviation on this particular subject looks minimal.

Looks like that could be exactly what is going on here. Someone used a different drawing as a basis for another one they created. And it doesn't really matter if the deviation looks minimal or not, does it? If the idea is simply to make it look just slightly different enough so that it could be argued that it is not the same image, and/or even the exact same person, I would think that just a few subtly differences are all that would be needed. And the fact that Ruth may have had a different pitching motion has absolutely nothing to do with this either. Again, if the artist's goal was to possibly trace an image from elsewhere, and then subtly change things like the facial features to make it look like it was someone else, they aren't going to be worrying about whether the pitching motion was correct or not. For all we know, the stamps' artist could have just been trying to make the player look more generic than how Marquard looked in the Semon drawing, and maybe it wasn't supposed to look anything like Ruth at all either. But then, why does it look a bit like Ruth? And by the way, does anyone know if it is possible that Semon was also used as the artist for the Youth's Companion stamp? If so, I can easily see the same artist re-using an earlier drawing as a basis for creating a slightly different version for a different project. I'm sure that has happened on many occasions in the past for artists trying to create things for public/commercial use.

Which leads me to point out another subtle, though very obvious, facial difference between the two images. On the Semon drawing, look at the shape of what is supposed to be Marquard's mouth, it very clearly is turned up ever so slightly at both ends. But now look at the mouth of the player on the stamp. The ends of that player's mouth are most definitely turning down. That isn't just some optical illusion, or some casual change. That is quite obviously an intentional change made by the stamp's artist, assuming he/she did use the original Semon drawing as a basis for the player's image on the stamp. I'm beginning to think more and more that it is very possible that the stamp's artist may have intentionally changed the facial features on a known Rube Marquard drawing, to at least have the face (and therefore the player) be more generic, let alone possibly be that the intent was for it to actually be Ruth after all. So again, why else the intentional, though subtle, changes to a known drawing of Rube Marquard like that?

Now if the stamp's image was based on an actual photo, that could be different. But it apparently isn't, so Todd's point about the possible use of a "Swipe File" sure doesn't seem implausible.

[robertsmithnocure]

100% Marquard IMHO.

[Aquarian Sports Cards]

There's a ton less detail and resolution in the image on the stamp which accounts for the differences and frankly the vagueness in the image. There's no doubt in my mind it's Marquard though. Look at other images that were translated into cards even on T206's there are often subtle differences because there is an artist interpretation between the two plus different mediums being used.