In his Carmel, N.Y. studio one winter morning in 1939, a harried artist packed a portrait into his station wagon and headed for Manhattan. As the car slithered down the slippery lane, one of the doors jounced open and snagged a roadside pine. The door was left behind dangling on the tree as the car sped on.

Thus did Ernest Hamlin Baker hurry to deliver his first TIME cover portrait: Poland's Statesman-Pianist Ignace Jan Paderewski (TIME, Feb. 27, 1939). Artist Baker, who had done some previous work for FORTUNE, had been given just 48 hours to turn in the rush assignment. He made the deadline, and has been doing TIME covers ever since. So far, he has done an impressive total of 347 portraits for TIME. Since so many of you have written to tell me how much you liked Baker's portraits, I asked him to tell us something about himself and his work.

His first ambition, says Baker, was to be a political cartoonist. After graduating from Colgate University, where he made pocket money by selling caricatures of the faculty, the Poughkeepsie Evening Enterprise hired him as a $21-a-week cartoonist. The next year Baker married, borrowed $500, and took his bride to New York City where he enrolled for evening classes in an industrial art school. This was a mistake, he says. "I lost confidence in myself and got so scared I quit after three months." He decided to go out and simply draw.

Baker's decision that he was his own best teacher proved to be correct. With his wife Ernestine acting as his agent, commissions began to come in. It was a series of profile illustrations for The New Yorker magazine that caught the eye of FORTUNE's art editor and eventually brought TIME and Baker together.

It was with Baker's first cover that TIME started its unique portraiture reporting, a technique in which the artist works entirely from photographs. Says Baker: "Having the subject sit through many poses would be impractical both for the artist and the busy person whose face has become so newsworthy. For each assignment the artist is given a basic photograph of his subject plus ten to 30 other pictures which furnish supplementary data on head construction, facial forms and expressions revealed by the different camera angles and lighting. I have searched thousands of photographs for facial forms, from bony structure and musculature, through talebearing wrinkles down to skin texture. I have found that this detached objective exploration of a person's features brings forth the subject's appearance and his character with surprising fidelity.''

Although the finished cover portraits are the property of the artist, TIME occasionally buys the original to present to the subject. So far, 105 people own original Baker portraits, 16 bought directly from the artist and 89 presented by TIME. The latest subject to receive his original portrait was U.S. Atom Boss Lewis Strauss (TIME. Sept. 21), who wrote recently to say that he considered himself highly flattered by Artist Baker's work.

Baker's favorite cover is his head of John L. Lewis (TiME, Dec. 16, 1946); the one which gave him the most trouble was the recent portrait of Procter & Gamble's President Neil McElroy (TIME, Oct. 5). "Everyone decided it would be nice to have soapsuds in the background," says Baker, "so I mixed up a lot of suds. I stared two weeks at those blasted soapsuds. I had to draw every single stinking bubble, millions of them. I nearly went nuts."

Artist Baker now lives "in a white house on a green knoll in a beautiful valley" in Hendersonville. N.C.. where, he says, "I work every day in the week and never, never have a day off. I'm in a gorgeous rut." It takes Baker two weeks to complete a TIME cover. He commutes to New York every other Wednesday to deliver a portrait and pick up his next assignment. During the work on a cover, he walks a mile before breakfast and does elaborate calisthenics to combat easel fatigue. The one exercise he hates is mowing the lawn. He is seriously thinking, he says, of planting the entire area with green concrete of rough texture.

Cordially yours,

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