Vaughan Alden Bass was an American painter of pin-up art.
Bass was a Chicago artist who started his career working for the Louis F. Dow Company in St. Paul during the mid-1930s. Bass created his own pin-ups for Brown & Bigelow, but he worked for Dow as a "paint over" artist, redoing work that other artists (notably Gil Elvgren) had done for the company.
Bass' style was often compared with that of Elvgren, Al Buell, and Joyce Ballantyne. In the late 1950s, Bass did a series of wrestling scenes that demonstrated his comfort with any subject matter. He created the Wonder Bread Girl in the 1950s. His portrait of President Dwight D. Eisenhower is in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
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“Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing and weep, soared up into the ring;
But most would use no wing.
O fools, said I, thus to prefer dark night
Before true light!”
—Henry Vaughan (1622–1695)
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—In New York City, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)