Tom Of Finland's Thieving Cowboy and Royale Studio

Dolphin Photography launched with Tom of Finland's 'Thieving Cowboy' (1960) 

 The 'Thieving Cowboy' is one of Tom of Finland's earliest works and will be familiar to many of the readers of this blog, not least for its memorable spanking content. It's probably less well known that the series was originally commissioned by our friends at Royale Studio. That was in 1957, according to the Colville Gallery, the year Royale itself was launched (see Timeline article at the new Royale blog). 

Coincidentally 1957 was also the year that Tom's pictures first 'came out' in AMG's Physique Pictorial (according to Hooven, Tom of Finland, His Life and Times, Chap 8, see also Tom of Finland Foundation, "How Tom went from belittled pornographer to iconic artist"). 

Hooven remarks that Royale was one of Tom's best customers and that he did 'several' series for them. 
I confess I don't know what the others were. 

The Tom of Finland Retrospective (Gay Men's Press, 1988) included one image from the 'Thieving Cowboy' series on page 14 and dated it as 1958. However, the earliest independently documented reference I can find for it in relation to Royale is an advert in 'Tomorrows Man' beefcake mag in August 1960 marking the launch of Royale's offshoot studio 'Dolphin Photography (reproduced above). 

This advertisement describes it as a 16-picture 'playlet' but a later ad in 'Manifique' in Spring 1961 revised the total upwards to 17. More recently JW Anderson claimed there were 26 images in the set altogether and since he was working with the Tom of Finland Foundation at the time he ought to know. However,  the evidence available to me suggests that 17 is probably right for the Royale set at any rate, although it is an unusual number, not amenable to fitting neatly into a sheet of thumbnails. It's possible Tom produced a longer version for publication elsewhere or that Royale commissioned a subset, perhaps with some new illustrations, thereby enabling them to claim exclusivity. The end of the story (next post) does offer more evidence on this. 

For this article, I have been able to assemble 15 images belonging to the set although 2 of them are incomplete. They come from the following web sources.

• Jock Spank has an article 'Cowboy Thief' with 12 pictures from the set. These images are reasonable quality but have been 'enhanced' and don't have the subtle detail of original drawings. Their numbering doesn't match my larger group.
• Recently 4 images of good original quality appeared on art auction sites purporting to be Numbers 2, 3, 12 and 13 in the series (original numbering). I have used all of them, sticking to their numbering and some replacing Jock Spank images.
• I have two images with numbers in the corners (from I don't know where). They have obviously been cut from Royale thumbnail sheets and show what Nos 14 and 16 depicted, but I have only used 16 for this article.
• To these I have added 4 images found embedded in Dolphin Photography adverts during my recent searches of vintage beefcake mags. Two were easy to extract from the advertising blurb (12 & 17) but the other two were tangled up with other imagery so I have (crudely) extracted them. They are therefore incomplete, mostly lacking backgrounds and definition, but they temporarily fill gaps in the sequence quite usefully. These are included as numbers 6 and 7.

I have guessed where the unnumbered ones fit based on the image narrative.

The next post will feature the full set of pictures as far as I have been able to go with it.

Below, one of the images after photographic enhancement.

Tom of Finland - 'The Thieving Cowboy' - 3, Caught In The Act