Jack Coggins

Jack Banham Coggins (July 10, 1911 – January 30, 2006) was an artist, author, and illustrator. He is known in the United States for his oil paintings, which focused predominantly on marine subjects. He is also known for his books on space travel, which were both authored and illustrated by Coggins. Besides his own works, Coggins also provided illustrations for advertisements and magazine covers and articles.

During World War II, he served as an artist and correspondent for '' YANK'' magazine, capturing and conveying wartime scenes from the front lines. Over the course of his career, Coggins produced more than 1,000 paintings and taught art classes for 45 years. He retired in May 2001 and died at his home in Pennsylvania in January 2006.

Biography

Early life

Coggins was born in London, England on July 10, 1911, the only child of Ethel May (née Dobby) and Sydney George Coggins. Sydney Coggins was Regimental Corporal Major of the First Regiment of Life Guards, the part of the Household Cavalry responsible for guarding the British Monarch;
Jack Coggins was born in his father's barracks.
During World War I, Sydney Coggins served with, and was commissioned by the regiment. After the war, he was appointed regimental Riding Master, but he was retired when the 1st and 2nd Life Guards were amalgamated into a single regiment under the Geddes Axe. A fellow officer, married to an American steel heiress, offered Sydney work as a secretary to his wife, and the Coggins family emigrated to Long Island, New York in 1923.

Education

While his father served with the Life Guards Regiment in France during World War I, Coggins and his mother lived with family in Folkestone, Kent. He attended the Imperial Service College, a public school preferred by army families. After moving to New York, Coggins enrolled at Roslyn High School in Roslyn Heights where he found difficulty in adjusting to the difference between military school in England and New York city public school. After graduation from Roslyn in 1928 at age 17, he enrolled in the New York City Grand Central School of Art and studied under Edmund Greacen, George Pearse Ennis, and Wayman Adams. In the early years, he painted advertising signs to support himself. With a grounding in fine art techniques, Coggins graduated to the Art Students League of New York, where he studied from 1933 to 1934 under noted artist Frank DuMond.

Marriage and later life

While a member of the faculty of Hunter College in New York, Coggins met Alma Wood, a fashion and photographic model.
They married in 1948 and moved to Pike Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania, where Coggins had purchased an old farm. Alma named their home "Crestfield," which, according to Jack, meant absolutely nothing.

Coggins taught his wife to paint, and she had success as an artist in her own right under the name Alma Woods. The couple would hold annual joint exhibitions for many years. Alma Coggins assisted her husband in the planning, research and typing of many of his books, and he acknowledged her efforts with book dedications to her.

He taught art classes at the Wyomissing Institute of the Arts from 1957 until 2001, despite being handicapped by the loss of his left eye due to infection after an operation.

Coggins was a signature member and Master Pastelist of the Pastel Society of America,
a Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists,
a member of the American Ordnance Association, the U.S. Naval Institute, and an adviser to the boards of the Philadelphia Maritime Museum and the Reading Public Museum.
He died at his home in Berks County, Pennsylvania at the age of 94 and willed his body to medical science.
Alma Wood-Coggins died March 4, 2007. Jack and Alma Coggins had no children and were survived by several nieces and nephews.

Illustrator, author and artist

Military illustrations of World War II

Coggins's interest in sailing and maritime subjects began in London when he would sail model yachts on Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. This interest developed into a lifelong passion during his teens when he sailed small craft on Hempstead Harbor, near his new home on Long Island. During the early years of World War II, Coggins took a sampling of his war illustrations to Worthen Paxton, the art director of ''LIFE Magazine'', who commissioned Coggins to produce a drawing of an imaginary coastal invasion of England. Coggins was paid $250 for that work, a large sum at the time, which paid his rent for five months. Appearing on July 15, 1940, this was the first of many war time illustrations for ''LIFE''.
Some of Coggins's works are in the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection.

During the early 1940s, Coggins obtained more work producing war pictures for other magazines, including a series of double-page spreads for the controversial newspaper '' PM'', and illustrations for ''The Saturday Evening Post''. Throughout the war years, most of the output of many large corporations was reserved for materiel production; however, management were keen to promote their connection to the war effort and keep their name before the buying public until they could resume peacetime sales. Coggins received advertising commissions from such corporations including Elco, Koppers, US Steel, and Westinghouse. He also received commissions from the U.S. War Department for aircraft recognition charts, and he was intrigued to later find these charts used during his army basic training.

Because of the quality of his maritime illustrations, Coggins was invited by publisher Doubleday to provide artwork for a children's book about the U.S. Navy; the author being Fletcher Pratt, the well known military historian. Coggins was invited to participate in Pratt's ''Naval Game'', based on a wargame developed by Fred T. Jane involving dozens of tiny wooden ships, built on a scale of one inch to fifty feet. These were spread over the floor of Pratt's apartment and their maneuvers were calculated via a complex mathematical formula. The result of Pratt and Coggins's first collaboration, published in 1941, was ''Fighting Ships of the U.S. Navy'', a volume that described in text and illustrated in full color every class of ship in the Navy.

Coggins was called up for Army service, and enlisted on April 8, 1943.
He was pulled from basic training at Fort Eustis, Virginia before he could complete it to work as an illustrator for '' YANK'' magazine. He was originally introduced to the Commanding Officer and Editor of ''YANK'', Colonel Franklin Forsberg, by Fletcher Pratt. On May 20, 1943, Coggins commenced work at the head office of ''YANK'' in New York, where he worked until his departure for Britain. Jack Coggins became a naturalized citizen of the United States on August 19, 1943.

He served as an artist for British ''YANK'' in London until August 2, 1945, and was discharged from the U.S. Army on November 3, 1945.Military Personnel Records, National Personnel Records Center, National Archives, St. Louis, Missouri. After serving as a Private for most of his time abroad, he finally made Corporal, and just before discharge, Sergeant. While in Britain, Coggins spent time on a Royal Navy convoy in the North Sea, witnessed the bombing of Saint-Lô

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