 Dutch Boy - The fair-haired advertising mascot for
Dutch Boy Paints® since 1907. Back at the turn of the 20th century, a consortium
of white lead paint companies joined forces to become the National Lead Company.
To promote the union, they hired an artist to create a new image for their paint
brand which used a 16th century "Dutch process" created by two chemists from
Holland.
The NLC first hired Rudolf Yook, an illustrator of Dutch descent, to create a
trademark logo. The result was a sketch of little boy dressed in overalls and
carrying a paint bucket and brush. The company then commissioned well known
artist, Lawrence Carmichael Earle to paint an oil portrait based on the sketch.
Using a local New Jersey nine-year-old Irish boy named Michael E. Brady for his
model, Earle created a portrait of a boy in overalls, wooden shoes and a floppy
cap, which has since been used to symbolize the superior quality of their paint
brand. The company's slogan in 1936 read: "Save the Surface and You Save All."
Dutch Boy® is a division of Sherwin Williams®
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Gallery of Dutch Boy Ads and Posters |
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TRIVIA NOTE: The story of
the "The Little Dutch Boy" (about a quick-thinking sunny-haired boy who places
his finger in a hole to plug a leaking dike) was based on the story about a
young boy in the 1865 novel "Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates" by American
writer, Mary Elizabeth Mapes Dodge. (In chapter 18, "Friends in Need" there is
this story read out in class - Lesson 62 - called 'The Hero of Haarlem.")
Inspired by the fictitious story, the town of Spaarndam, a city in the
Netherlands near Haarlem, erected a statue to the brave boy.
External Links
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