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In 1962, Andy Warhol produced “Campbell’s Soup Cans”: 32 paintings, each representing a flavor of Campbell’s condensed soup. “With these works, Warhol took on the tradition of still-life painting, declaring a familiar household brand of packaged food a legitimate subject in the age of Post-War economic recovery,” according to Christie’s. Warhol appropriated the famous soup can and reinvented it as a work of art. He can be credited with converging the world of high art and supermarket branding, propelling the pop-art movement forward and possibly even boosting the sales of canned soup, but the label that he rode to stardom was not his design at all.

Campbell’s Soup Company

Sixty-five years earlier, Dr. John T. Dorrance created the first condensed soups for the Campbell Soup Company. Originally, the label that was affixed to those first soup cans was orange and blue. The following year, in 1898, Herberton L. Williams, who subsequently became the company’s treasurer, comptroller and assistant general manager, attended a University of Pennsylvania versus Cornell football game at which Cornell first played in red and white uniforms. Williams was so impressed with the color scheme that he proposed the labels be changed to match.

Regarding the other elements of the design, “We do not have specific information on who designed the label, mostly because our records indicate that it was a cooperative effort,” Campbell’s corporate archivist, Jonathan Thorn, told me in an e-mail. “Also, the small evolutions of the label in the early years help to indicate this. The Campbell script for instance is very similar to Joseph Campbell’s own signature, which may have been used as a basis for the label script.”

The script “was designed to appeal to the housewife of the time,” Thorn said. “It was intended to look like cursive handwriting of the day that one would find on handwritten recipes, equating to ‘Homemade.’ ”

The medallion on the center of the label went through a number of different iterations from 1898 to 1900, ending with the version seen in this post, which represents the medal the Campbell Soup Company received at the Exposition Universelle de 1900 in Paris. Thorn noted: “The 1900 Paris medal was designed to replicate as accurately as possible the actual medal itself. It would be my guess that an engraver or the printing company’s engraver would have been employed to replicate the medal for printing.” That said, the first printer to produce the labels, Sinnickson Chew & Sons Company, is also credited with aiding in the design of the original label.

Small adjustments to the label have been made over time, but the original concept is easily visible in all the iterations that have been conceived, making it the icon that it is, Warhol or no Warhol.