Rolf Armstrong was born in Bay City, Michigan on April 21, 1889 to Richard and Harriet (Scott) Armstrong. Armstrong's work for the Pictorial Review was largely responsible for that magazine achieving a circulation of more than two million by 1926. A year later, he was the best selling calendar artist at Brown and Bigelow. In 1930, RCA hired him to paint pin-ups to advertise their products, and in 1933 the Thomas D. Murphy Company signed him to produce a series of paintings for their line. Rolf Armstrong died in 1960 on the island of Oahu, Hawaii as one of the best "pin-up" artists of the first half of the twentieth century.
