Ilo Geraldine Kopland was born on February 4, 1903 in Des Moines, Iowa. Her father, John H. Kopland, was born in 1869 in New Jersey of German ancestry. Her mother, Daisy Irene Pickell, was born in 1870 in Otranto, Iowa, of English-Canadian ancestry. Her parents married in 1898 in Iowa, and had four children, David Victor Kopland (b.1899), Lucille E. Kopland (b.1902), Ilo Geraldine Kopland (b.1903), and Mavis Aileen Kopland (b.1908). The family attended Methodist Church. The father was a salesman at the Continental Feather Company in Des Moines.
By 1910 the family had moved to South Dakota, where they lived on Center Street in Turton.
By 1914 the family had moved to Brookings, South Dakota, where they lived at 902 Ninth Street. The father worked as a traveling salesman of medical supplies. The mother kept a boarding house for commercial travelers.
In 1915, Ilo Kopland, age twelve, began to study art at South Dakota State College in Brookings.
In June of 1918 Ilo Kopland, age fifteen, finished her studies at South Dakota State Collage in Brookings.
On September 12, 1918 during the Great War, the eldest child, David Victor Kopland, registered with his draft board. He was recorded at that time to be nineteen, tall, thin, with blue eyes and reddish-brown hair. He had been employed as a laborer at the South Dakota State College Experimental Agriculture Station. He was honorably discharged after the armistice in 1919 and returned to live with his family in South Dakota.
In 1920 David Victor Kopland began to attend South Dakota State College at Brookings, where he studied animal husbandry.
In 1924 the brother graduated from college and continued to work at the Experimental Agriculture Station of South Dakota State College at Bookings.
In 1926 David Victor Kopland became assistant dairy husbandry man at the Huntley experimental dairy farm station in Osborn, Montana. His annual salary was $3,000.
In 1927 the eldest sister, Lucille E. Kopland, who worked as a school teacher, married a traveling salesman named Charles M. Vagner. She and her husband left Montana and moved to Denver, Colorado.
In 1928 Ilo Kopland, age twenty-three, left Montana and moved to live with her older married sister in Denver. Ilo Kopland began to study art at the Chappell School of Art in Denver. The school was previously known as the Denver School of Fine Arts and was affiliated with the University of Denver.
In 1930 the father, John H. Kopland, died at the age of sixty. After this tragic death the eldest son became the major provider for the family. The widowed mother and the two unmarried sisters moved to Huntley to live with him.
December 4, 1930 Ilo Kopland and her younger sister, Mavis Kopland, enrolled in the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Illinois. They lived at the YWCA on 8th Street in Chicago. School archives indicate both sisters attended the same classes on illustration, advertising design, lettering, painting, and figure drawing. After each semester the sisters returned to live with their older brother and widowed mother at the Huntley Project in Osborn, Montana.
In June of 1935 Ilo and Mavis Kopland completed their final semester at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.
In 1936 Ilo and Mavis Kopland moved to New York City, where they lived at 138 East 38th Street in Manhattan. Both sisters studied art at the Grand Central School of Art, which was on the top floor of Grand Central Station, the landmark railroad terminal building at 42nd Street and Park Avenue. Their teachers included Harvey Dunn, Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), and Pruett Carter (1891-1955), who was widely regarded as a top illustrator of romantic fiction. Another student in this class was Alureda Leach Baumhofer (1903-1993), the wife of Walter Baumhofer.
Street & Smith published the first cover illustration by Ilo Kopland on the September 1937 issue of the pulp magazine Smart Love Stories. Instead of using oil paint on canvas, she created her full-color cover with soft pastels, in the popular style of Rolf Armstrong (1889-190), Earl Moran (1893-1984), Earl Christy (1882-1961), Zoe Mozert, and Margaret Brundage.
Ilo Kopland went on to draw pastel covers for romantic pulp magazines such as, Love Book, Variety Love, Love Fiction Monthly, and Love Short Stories. She also made pastel covers and story illustrations for slick magazines, such as Secrets and True Magazine.
By 1939 Mavis Kopland lived by herself in a large apartment building at 5 Prospect Place in Tudor City along the East River at 43rd Street. She struggled to support herself as a free lance commercial artist, but was frequently unemployed.
On March 24, 1940 The Billings Gazette published an article on Ilo Kopland on their front page. It was entitled, "Sister Of Osborn Man Prominent In Magazine Illustrations Field."
In 1944 the youngest sister, Mavis Aileen Kopland, became ill and returned to recuperate with her family in Montana, where she died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-six on November 26, 1944. After this tragic loss, Ilo Kopland left NYC and returned to live with her mother and older brother in Billings, Montana. She continued to illustrate romantic fiction, and also developed a second career painting dogs for kennel shows, calendars and hunting magazines.
On April 16, 1946 the artist's maternal grandfather, Ernest Pickell, died at the age of seventy-seven in Oregon.
During the 1940s the U.S. Department of Agriculture produced a monthly circular with reports of developments in dairy research that were authored by David Victor Kopland.
In 1954 the artist visited her older sister in Denver, where she suddenly became ill, and was hospitalized. Ilo Geraldine Kopland died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one in the Denver Colorado General Hospital on July 6, 1954.
On September 9, 1958 the artist's mother, Daisy Kopland, died at the age of eighty-eight in Montana.
In 1959 her brother David Victor Kopland married his wife, Janet Kopland. She was born April 1, 1897. The bride and groom were sixty-two and sixty.
On September 12, 1963 David Victor Kopland died at the age of sixty-four in Montana.
© David Saunders 2015 |
