Ben Stahl, 77, Artists School Founder, Dies

Ben Stahl, a prolific illustrator for the old Saturday Evening Post in the years when that magazine’s covers were tacked to walls and bulletin boards across America, has died of cancer at his retirement home in Sarasota, Fla.

He was 77 and died Oct. 19.

A founder, in 1949, of the Famous Artists School of Westport, Conn., a nationally known correspondence school for aspiring artists whose faculty included his longtime Post colleague, Norman Rockwell, Stahl’s work appeared in more than 750 issues of the Post. He also drew for expensive and limited editions of classic novels, including “Madame Bovary,” “Little Women” and “Gone With the Wind.” His “Blackbeard’s Ghost,” which he both wrote and illustrated, was made into a 1968 Walt Disney film starring Peter Ustinov as the pirate incarnated into modern times.

Born in Chicago, Stahl had his early works exhibited there at the Art Institute’s International Water Color Show, while other of his paintings have subsequently been displayed at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and other museums and galleries across the land.