Paintings by George Quaintance
Born in 1902 in Stanley Virginia, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, George Quaintance was a gay American artist, famous for his idealized, strongly homoerotic depictions of men in mid-twentieth century magazines. Growing up in a farm family, George Quaintance, showing an artistic potential, was encouraged by his parents to pursue art rather than forcing him into the family business of farming. At the age of eighteen, he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York City, studying painting, drawing, and dance. Quaintance’s first art assignments were producing anonymous graphic work for several advertising firms.
By 1934, Quaintance began to sell freelance cover illustrations to a variety of pulp magazines, such as Movie Humor, Snappy Detective Stories, Gay French Life, Ginger, and Tempting Tales. Using historical settings to justify the nudity or distance the subjects from modern society, his artwork featured idealized muscular, semi-nude or nude male figures; A common motif of his work was the theme of the Wild West, complete with cowboys on the ranch or camping out.
Quaintance later moved to Los Angeles, where his artwork began to gather recognition and establish, in an illustrative form, the stereotype of the gay macho, sexually active man. He used young, attractive athletes as nude models; but he personally often posed nude as a model for his paintings. An influence on many upcoming homoerotic artists, Quaintance was in 1937 the highest-paid illustrator for Gay French Magazine, earning more than fifty thousand dollars for his illustrative work.
In 1938, Quaintance returned to Stanley, Virginia, with his companion Victor Garcia, a handsome, young man from Puerto Rico who became a prominent model for his 1940s photographs, his business associate, and life-long partner until Quaintance’s untimely death. Although Garcia was with Quaintance through the rest of his life, Quaintance also had a series of other lovers, many of whom became models for his paintings. 
Quaintance’s paintings and illustrations appeared on the covers and inside most of the seminal physique and body-building magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Physique Pictorial, Body Beautiful and Demi-Gods. In the early 1950s, Quaintance and Garcia moved to Rancho Siesta near Phoenix, Arizona, which became the home of Studio Quaintance, a successful business venture based around Quaintance’s artworks.
In Rancho Siesta, Quaintance articulated a vision that was unique, and that spawned dozens of imitators. He offered idealized male images to a hungry international audience; and he offered them in a context that was rugged, masculine, and romantic, as well as erotic. Quaintance presented Levi jeans as a garment that was sexy and serviceable. He also embraced Mexican, Native American, and Latino cultures and people in a way that avoided caricature and stereotyping. Quaintance realized America’s fascination with the West and gave all those fans a different cowboy role mode. He created a world where queer boys grew up to be queer men without the specter of homophobic intrusion.
George Quaintance died in a Los Angeles hospital of a heart-attack on his 55th birthday. His life-long partner Victor Garcia and long-time friend Tom Syphers inherited his estate. Quaintance’s works can be found in many private collections and museums.
Note: An excellent read on the life of George Quaintance is “Quaintance: The Short Life of an American Pioneer” by Ken Furtado and John Waybright