To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

Dear Subscriber,

TIME'S original cover portrait of General "Tooey" Spaatz of North African fame hangs on the wall of his wife's home in Washington.

"I have never seen a picture of him half as good," she wrote Artist Ernest Hamlin Baker. "It is truly startlingly lifelike. I have no idea of what your method is--though obviously you must work from photograph--but the result is wonderfully real."

Originals of TIME covers by Baker have gone (among many others) to General Doolittle, Secretary Knox, Manpower Czar McNutt--and still another (a portrait of General De Gaulle) so impressed the Fighting French that they dropped tens of thousands of reprints on Occupied France. And hundreds of subscribers have asked, like Mrs. Spaatz, "How does he do it?"

Most front-rank portraitists look down their noses at painting from photographs, but Baker--faced with the obvious impossibility of getting a busy air marshal in England to sit for his portrait one week and Lord Wavell in India the next--has made a virtue of necessity and developed such an effective new technique that The American Artist says his TIME covers are creating "a sensation in artistic circles."

Baker feels that a TIME cover calls for extraordinarily careful detail. In its writing, he explains, TIME crams far more facts into its pages than any other magazine, in order to give its subscribers all the information they need to form a sound judgment. "I am a reporter, too, and it is my job to help TIME'S readers size up the man or woman of the week by faith fully recording all the lines, hollows and forms that have been stamped into his face by his personal Munichs and Dunkirks, by all his numberless deeds and intentions, good, bad and indifferent."

To get the whole story from the man's face, Baker spends hours with a magnifying glass pouring over scores of photographs from TIME & LIFE'S tremendous picture files. He says this lets him study his character at leisure from so many different angles and lightings that he can often catch features an artist painting from life would almost surely miss. Next he builds up a sort of terrain map of the facial mounds and crevices --and before he starts his portrait in color he makes several black-and-white working drawings that look almost like architect's plans (see cut, lower center).

Two of TIME'S three top flight cover artists are Russian, but Baker is as American as apple pie. He began his art career at 17 when he invested $15 in a drawing course by mail--and since then almost everything he has done seems to have prepared him in one way or another for his present work as cover artist for TIME. He drew 25-c--apiece caricatures to help pay his way through Colgate--was political cartoonist on two newspapers--for years was one of America's most sought-after magazine illustrators.

Baker has painted more cover portraits than any other TIME artist (81 since February 1939)--and you will find his latest on TIME this week.

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