A Letter From The Publisher, Aug. 30, 1954

When Artist Guy Rowe (“Giro”) is not working on a cover painting for TIME —such as this week’s portrait of Burma’s Premier U Nu— he likes to take a brushman’s holiday and sketch faces elsewhere. One of his favorite hangouts is in the upper reaches of mid-Manhattan— a nondescript restaurant which is a popular early-morning gathering place for a strange group of customers that ranges from cab drivers and nightwatchmen to bookies and brokendown prizefighters. To these customers, who are either starting their day or ending their night, Guy is just a small man with exceedingly bright eyes, bushy brows and a halo of white hair. They do not know his name, but he shares the casual nodding acquaintance of strangers who follow the same daily routine. Says Guy: “I wear my old work clothes, and they think I’m just an old coot on relief.”

As proof of this, Guy recalls the time he was away on a trip to California. “When I returned, all the drunks and book ies thought I had been in jail for three months.” In a career that has ranged from chicken-farming to vaudeville, being a jailbird is about the only activity that Guy has missed.

Guy started life in Utah, where his father managed a copper mine before it was sold and he decided to move to California and go into chicken ranching. The elder Rowe soon found this too hazardous a business, so he invented a speedwriting system called Rowe Vowel Shorthand and opened a business school in Michigan. When this venture also failed, the family moved to San Francisco and Guy got a job peddling newspapers. After the 1906 earthquake, the Rowes headed for Detroit, where Guy went to work in the railroad station smashing baggage at $2 a week.

It was the next job, as a mechanic in a Packard assembly plant, that eventually led to a career in art. During lunch hour, Guy and some other factory hands practiced tumbling and acrobatics. A talent scout for a vaudeville team noticed Guy and offered him a job with the troupe. Guy took it, but soon decided the future looked mighty meager. Says he: “I kept seeing all those old acrobats hanging around, and they always looked so sad.” Guy, who had always liked to draw, spotted an easier act in the show: the artist on stage who drew pictures of customers or famous people on request. After a successful try at this, Guy decided to leave the stage, get another factory job and go to night classes at the Detroit School of Fine Arts.

All went well with the factory job and art school for two years. Then an elder brother, who had been working as a lumberjack in Oregon, paid Guy a visit and repeated his favorite philosophy: “If you don’t like your job, for heaven’s sake quit it since you only live once.” Result: Guy took off for a year’s work with his brother in lum ber camps along the Columbia River. Woods man Rowe returned to Detroit to finish art school, marry a fellow student, and make a name for himself in the New York community of free-lance artists.

The first TIME cover to carry the signature of “Giro” was that of General Dwight Eisenhower (Sept. 13. 1943). Since then Guy has done some 60 cover portraits for TIME. One which he remembers rather quizzically was the cover on Russia’s former police boss, Lavrenty Beria (July 20, 1953) During his work on Beria, a rush order came from another magazine for a portrait of St. Paul. “It was,” says Guy, “a matter of working alternate days on good and evil.”

You may recall a book (In Our Image) published by Oxford University Press, Inc. (TIME, Oct. 10, 1949), which was a collection of Old Testament narratives illustrated by Guy Rowe. He found the models for some of these faces in his favorite Manhattan restaurant. The tired face of the floor sweeper, for example, was his inspiration for Jephthah, the man who made the rash vow. For Adam, he used his own son Charles, and Guy himself posed before a mirror for David mourning Absalom.

Now, between TIME covers and other assignments, Artist Rowe is working on a ten-year project: a book of New Testament portraits.

Cordially yours,