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Marc discovered these drawings on Flickr. I’m not sure where they were published originally.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/autohistorian/8607955035/in/set-72157620825781760/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/autohistorian/8609062408/in/set-72157620825781760
Those are scanned from a Willys Plant Tour brochure titled “What I Saw” at Willys Overland.
The first page says they are pencil sketches by Eddie Devlin of the Willys Overland Art Department.
At one time I made full size posters out of them and sold them at a Willys Reunion then donated the money.
While other people were trying to track down old Peter Sessions water colors, I was chasing the original Devlin sketches. Long story short, he worked alot of places including Chevrolet. I have seen the original photos these are sketches of, but never found the originals. I tracked his daughter down to Poland and the trail went cold, so the originals are still out there somewhere. I want to say this was a 1949 publication.
Great info Joe, Thanks!
Hopefully, the originals were not housed in one of the several file cabinets that went into the ground at the old Overland factory site. If he created them while working with or for W-O, he may have had to sign a release that would have given them ownership of the artwork.
Kevin,
If Willys had posession, they would have likely been stored with the rest of the artwork. Near as I can tell, the original artwork was included in the auction prior to demolition of the Willys Administration builing April 15th , 1979. Paul Brim bought at least the lobby furniishings, and the “demo’ presentation” room above the lobby. The main document storage and microfilm storage was below the main lobby staircase according to internal documents I have read. I suspect they are in a landfill, or were destroyed when the basement of the Plymouth Road facility was flooded.
The factory artwork Paul bought was sold at Hershey for 25 years after 1978, the residual was enough to fill a 24 foot trailer over my head.
Paul died in June 2008, and a few individuals I previously considered friends did their best to make sure I didn’t hear about the auction.
If the Devlin prints are not in private hands, I suspect they may be in the Kaiser Archive in Oakland.