Portraits of Whiskey Men, Etc.

I’ve made Portrait Drawings of many Whiskey Men. I have also made artwork for an animated training film. I’ll share some of these with you here…

I created many portraits of the founders at Buffalo Trace, the famous Kentucky distillers. I assume the initial image was of the founder, Thomas H. Handy, though I have this file merely as ‘Buffalo Trace’:

This one was a challenge, as I only had a crude sketch to work with, Apparently, there are no existing photos of Mr. Handy…

My pioneering work at The Wall Street Journal, making portraits for the paper, prepared me well for this assignment. We had to deal with some dodgy material at The Journal. (Once, a reporter swiped a clipping from a country club bulletin-board of a subject not wishing to be in the newspaper!) Onwards to some early characters of the whiskey business…

Above, Mr. Stagg. Next, below, we have Mr. Weller…

These were all pretty early founders by the look of them. Moving ahead, we have Mssrs Blanton and Taylor. Taylor looks like a figure from just prior to Prohibition…

You can tell these men meant business! Note the stern, earnest expression, complimented by the dent in his tophat. Moving into the later managers…

Here’s Pappy Van Winkle. There is a famous brand named after him.

and Mr. Schupp, from the 1st half of last century. Aside from Buffalo Trace, I once made a nice portrait of one of the founders of Brown Forman, another distiller from Kentucky…

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you (above) Garvin Brown. I mentioned an animated film. Here are some images from that film project, made for training purposes at Brown Forman:

The tuck was used to travel through various scenes of the film. It’s a typical ‘work truck’ from the 20’s or 30’s. Next, a billboard leading into the distillery proper. Note the monkeys climbing the bottle— a strange image, indeed! There were many such scenes for the whiskey-truck to drive through… Here is one the doors of a barrel-house:

Finally, an old-fashioned tap-room…

Old fashioned, invoking nostalgia: But for the 1920’s lightswitch, it could have been 19th-century, with the service bell and manual cash register!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the trip down memory lane with me. And, if you’d like a portrait created, historic or contemporary, I can be found at Kevin Sprouls Illustration. Until Next Time…