![]() ![]() ![]() His agency was one of the first tenants of the newly-opened Chrysler Building. Thornton expanded that business to become the nation's first full service modeling agency in 1929. Reportedly, over 1,500 of the replications of Thornton's own head had been sold by 1930. Thornton's agent, John Robert Powers, offered the plaster heads to artists and sculptors to work from instead of the model. In 1928, Thornton created a small "head factory" (Walter Thornton & Co.) in a brownstone building near Grand Central Station, where he hand-crafted and sold plaster copies of his own head until 1931. The Minneapolis Tribune article referred to Thornton's face as one of the most well-known in America, due to his ubiquitous presence in 1920s advertisements. Thornton mass-marketed plaster copies of his own head. Williams, Saul Tepper, Arthur William Brown, James Montgomery Flagg and Howard Chandler Christy. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, Alfred Cheney Johnston, Neysa McMein, Percy Edward Anderson, John La Gatta, Bradshaw Crandall, McClelland Barclay, C.D. He went on to pose for most of the leading artists, illustrators and photographers of the first half of the 20th century, including J.C. He was known in the tight-knit artists' community of Greenwich Village in the late 1920s as "The Profile". He did just that, signing on with The John Robert Powers Agency not long after (on whose roster he remained until 1931). ![]() In 1925, illustrator Georgia Warren spotted Walter Thornton on a park bench in New York City. Thornton was given an honorary discharge for "ineligibility." He later became a bricklayer. Orphaned when he was young, Thornton enlisted in the Army to fight in World War I at the age of 14. He retired from the agency in 1958 and spent the rest of his life in Ajijic, Mexico. Many of his models achieved Hollywood fame and success. His company represented both male and female models, as well as a separate agency for child models. Thornton was twice a judge of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, NJ (19 ). Walter Clarence Thornton (Ap– May 14, 1990) was an American model and modeling agent who founded the Walter Thornton Model Agency in 1930 and went on to worldwide fame with his World War II-era "Walter Thornton Pin-Up Girls." Thornton rose to success from being an unsheltered orphan and a bricklayer. ![]()
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