Wright, David - The Club Raymonde, cover (1953)

This original cover artwork — gouache on board, signed with a "DW" monogram at lower right — by the British illustrator & Carol Day creator David Wright (1912–1967), one of the most distinctive pin-up and fashion artists working in mid-century Britain. The painting was produced for Harborough Publishing's English-language edition of The Club Raymonde, attributed on the cover to "Jules-Jean Morac" and billed as a "First Translation from the French." It dates to around 1953, the year Harborough seems to have issued the last clutch of Morac titles.

Wright's name was made in 1941, when The Sketch commissioned him to draw a weekly series of glamorous women. The series ran from 1941 to 1951 and totalled 169 illustrations, mostly modelled on his wife Esme, and it established him as one of the most popular pin-up artists of the Second World War. During the war he was based as a driving instructor for the armed forces in Abersoch, Wales, which left him plenty of time to keep illustrating. The wartime "lovelies" became loose inserts that servicemen pinned up in their barracks, and in cultural terms Wright is usually placed alongside Vargas and Petty as the British answer to the American pin-up tradition.

When the Sketch contract ended, Wright continued producing illustrations for magazines including Men Only, Playboy and Esquire, and his first comics work — starring "Kit Carson" — appeared in Cowboy Picture Library number 56 in July 1952. He then created the strip "Jo" for the Empire News and "Judy" for Tit-Bits, starting in March 1953, both written by Peter Meriton — story strips showing leggy girls in exotic locations on which Wright developed his style. That work paved the way for "Carol Day," which began in the Daily Mail on September 10, 1956 — a soap-opera strip about a tall, attractive blonde fashion model pursuing love, life and career against the backdrop of post-war London. Carol Day ran until Wright's death in May 1967 and is the work he is best remembered for today. 

The Club Raymonde cover sits squarely in the same early-1950s window as the Tit-Bits and Empire News strips — and it is one of a substantial run of paperback covers Wright produced for British pulp publishers in those years, including titles in the Sexton Blake Library after its 1956 revamp and other Harborough covers such as The Copy-Cat Killings (1950) and at least three of the Morac titles. David Wright was a book-jacket and commercial artist whose work graced many a cover at the time.

Harborough Publishing of London was a small post-war operation that turned out cheap, stapled paperbacks — what collectors now call "mushroom" publishers — through the late 1940s and early '50s, specialising in mildly racy fiction at a moment when paper rationing was easing and a hungry market existed for anything that looked French and naughty. 

"Jules-Jean Morac" is almost certainly a house pseudonym and the "First Translation from the French" line on the cover should be read with a raised eyebrow. Inventing a French original was a standard trick of British pulp houses of the period, lending an air of continental sophistication (and an implicit alibi for slightly stronger content) to what may well have been written in English from the start. 

This cover was also featured on page 176 of Terry Parker’s ‘Sirens: The Pin-Up Art of David Wright’, the definitive examination of David Wright’s commercial illustration and pin-up work.