Art by the creator of Snap, Crackle and Pop featured in new exhibit

How to go

What: “Vernon Grant’s Winter Frolic: Santas, Snow and Signature Gnomes”

When: Through Jan. 29

Where: Springfield Center for the Arts at Wittenberg University, 107 Cliff Park Road

Museum admission: $5; free on Sundays (closed Mondays)

SPRINGFIELD — Getting to see just a dozen original works by commercial illustrator Vernon Grant at the Springfield Center for the Arts at Wittenberg University is like being told you can only have the recommended serving size of 1¼ cups of Rice Krispies for breakfast.

Unless it’s Grape-Nuts, more is always better when it comes to cereal.

And Grant’s whimsical paintings are nothing short of Cocoa Krispies.

Back in 1932, he sold Kellogg’s on a new way to sell its Rice Krispies brand — with a trio of elfin mascots he designed and called Mr. Snap, Mr. Crackle and Mr. Pop.

Cereal had never before been marketed to kids.

“They put him on an immediate retainer for $250,000, which was a lot for 1932,” said Mary Lynn Norton, curator of the Vernon Grant collection at the Culture and Heritage Museums in Rock Hill, S.C.

With the holidays in mind, Wittenberg worked with Norton to bring a small selection of Grant’s charming work, in addition to period advertising and magazine covers, to the local art museum.

Despite its size, “Vernon Grant’s Winter Frolic: Santas, Snow and Signature Gnomes” marks the first time Grant’s work has been on view outside either the Kellogg Co. headquarters in Battle Creek, Mich., or the South Carolina city where he settled after World War II.

The show lacks iron without any original Rice Krispies art, but you’re guaranteed to get more than your recommended daily percentage of silver and gold.

Grant, a native Midwesterner who died in 1990 at age 88, was particularly drawn to Santa Claus.

Makes sense — remember that Snap, Crackle and Pop could pass for three of Santa’s elves.

“There’s a Vernon Grant quote,” Norton explained, “that says, ‘Men are only grown-up children.’ ”

The show nicely complements the major Norman Rockwell exhibit appearing at the Dayton Art Institute through Feb. 5, and provides a chance to see up close the work of another major American illustrator from the golden age.

“In December 1946,” Norton said, “he was on the cover of four national magazines.”

That is, Grant provided the cover art.

And that’s how this work ended up on display locally in the first place.

Grant illustrated 26 covers of Collier’s magazine between 1940 and 1946.

A competitor to Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s was printed in Springfield, inside the massive downtown structure that’s still known, 55 years after the presses stopped, as the Crowell-Collier building.

Wittenberg initially applied for a grant to assemble an exhibit of Collier’s covers by a who’s who of illustrators, said Lin Erickson, wife of Wittenberg President Mark Erickson and a member of the art center’s oversight committee.

The grant request failed, but Witt already had developed a relationship with Norton in South Carolina.

“We learned a lot about his passion for Santa Claus,” Erickson said.

While the work on view is mostly seasonal in nature, an original Collier’s cover from 1944 has been included for good measure.

“The exhibition we just had up was about the Holocaust,” Erickson said. “We didn’t really want that up for the holidays. That’s kind of intense.”

Instead, viewers will be treated to such original Grant illustrations as “Empty Pockets,” a Depression-era painting of a tapped-out Kris Kringle that first was used as a greeting card, then by the Woolworth Co.

And if you think “Winter Scene,” Grant’s cover art for a 1946 issue of Saturday Home magazine, looks like it could’ve been produced by Walt Disney’s studio, just know this — before setting out for New York in 1932 to begin his commercial illustration career, Grant spent five years in Los Angeles as an art instructor.

Many of his students went on to work for Disney.

“He was big in his own right,” Norton said. “Norman Rockwell did not create the most long-standing advertising characters.”

Indeed.

Everybody knows Snap, Crackle and Pop — or Piff, Paff and Puff, as they’re known in Sweden.