Esther Bruton’s illustrations for "Behind Your Sugar Bowl"

Esther Bruton, illustration for Behind Your Sugar Bowl, frontispiece

During the Depression, Esther Bruton was fortunate to be hired for several commercial projects. (You can read about her work for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company here). In the mid-1930s she provided illustrations for Behind Your Sugar Bowl: The Story of Sugar in Words and Pictures (1936). Published by the California and Hawaiian Sugar Refining Corporation of San Francisco, known today as C&H, the pamphlet is a feel-good history of the sugar industry that describes the process of how sugarcane is grown, harvested, transported, and manufactured into sugar.  The text was provided by Neill C. Wilson, a minor novelist who wrote books about the Old West. The pamphlet includes numerous black and white images by Roger Sturtevant, a well-respected photographer who was close friends with many Bay Area photographers including Edward Weston, Johan Hagemeyer, Imogen Cunningham, and her husband Roi Partridge.[1] 

The pamphlet glosses over labor issues and abuses associated with the sugar cane industry and focuses instead on a glowing review of Crockett, California, the company town where the C&H sugar refinery was located. The pamphlet boasts that “sunshine and blue water combine to make Crockett’s setting one of tonic healthfulness and beauty. The tree-shaded, garden-framed homes of the refinery’s 1,600 employees occupy high ground and look down upon the big plant… [the C&H] employees enjoy the highest and the most assured annual income of any sugar-refinery workers in the industry” (p. 13).  Esther’s sweet and colorful drawings are well-matched to the optimistic mood of the pamphlet and would be appropriate in a children’s book. In fact, her drawings have been aptly compared to Virginia Lee Burton’s illustrations for Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.[2] 

The frontispiece of the pamphlet features Esther’s painting of happy, well-dressed field workers in natty bandanas chopping sugar cane as a white factory looms in the distance. Her illustration of a sugar cane press makes the powerful machinery seem like a benign child’s toy. 

Esther Bruton, illustration for Behind Your Sugar Bowl, p. 7.

 

Esther Bruton, illustration for Behind Your Sugar Bowl, p. 12.

Behind Your Sugar Bowl is a sanitized version of a complex industry, yet this doesn’t change the fact that Esther Bruton’s drawings are both technically impressive and typical of Depression-era artwork that idealizes the heroic worker and glorifies American industry.

All photos are from Behind Your Sugar Bowl: The Story of Sugar in Words and Pictures (San Francisco: The California and Hawaiian Sugar Refining Corporation, 1936).

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[1]Therese Thau Heyman. “Photography and the Group f.64.” In Paul J. Karlstrom (ed). On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900-1950.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 257.

[2]David Allen.  “These paintings of Kaiser Steel construction in Fontana are a blast.”  Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (Rancho Cucamonga, CA), 9 Aug. 2018.