American illustrator Mead Schaeffer, a contemporary of Norman Rockwell, was strongly influenced by N. C. Wyeth, from the generation before theirs. In some of Schaeffer's illustrations for classic books he almost seems to be trying to impersonate Wyeth:
Most of the time, though, he used a lighter palette and line (or a more impressionistic treatment of the surface of the image) to soften the bold, solid modeling of figures and forms that characterized Wyeth's illustrations, while still evoking the Wyeth “look”:
During WWII, for The Saturday Evening Post, Schaeffer did a series of portraits of soldiers with picturesque jobs which relied on a photo-realistic technique, dramatized by extreme angles — like the image of the aircraft-carrier signalman at the head of this post, and of the naval-convoy lookout below:
These portraits seem to owe more to the graphic style of propaganda posters than to the more complex narrative strategies of many of the artists who did Post covers in this era.