In 1946, a 30-year-old illustrator from Evansville, Ind., named Nat Youngblood took a train to Pittsburgh in order to interview for a position at The Pittsburgh Press. Two years out of the Army and with a wife, two young children and few other prospects back home, Youngblood was hopeful of landing a promising position with the major Scripps-Howard publication and leaving behind a dead-end job with an advertising agency.

But when he caught sight of Pittsburgh's sooty skyline, he felt his heart sink. As he sat in editor Edward T. Leech's office at the Press building, the sight of sugar melting out of a train car and into Pittsburgh's filthy landscape stuck in his mind.

But Leech told him: "We're building a new city, and you're going to paint it for us."

Unsure of just what he was getting himself into, but unwilling to return to an unfulfilling job, Youngblood took the position.

This past December, after a long and prolific career as a Press illustrator and art director, and then as an independent artist, Youngblood died at the age of 92. During his tenure at the Press, his paintings became a staple on the pages of the Sunday Roto and Family Magazine sections, depicting an almost idealized version of a city that, by the time he laid eyes on it, had a half-century's worth of some of the worst environmental conditions in the country.

What he showed Pittsburghers during those early years was the utopian vision that would drive the city's development throughout the latter half of the 20th century.

Pittsburgh was then in the midst of its first major environmental and redevelopment programs. Backed by the city's major corporate interests and politicians in the form of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, the Pittsburgh Renaissance had found traction where earlier citizen-led movements had failed. Leech himself had helped push through the city's first comprehensive smoke control ordinance by devoting front-page attention to the United Smoke Council's battle for smoke control.

But the Pittsburgh that Nat Youngblood encountered that day resembled more the one outsiders were still referring to as "the smoky city." The city's lingering industrialized image represented labor strife, pollution and deplorable living standards. Ten years earlier, smoke in Pittsburgh had represented progress and industry. Now it represented the fallout.

For Youngblood, a job with the Press promised both greater artistic freedom and opportunity for exposure. The world of commercial illustration had been an experience in frustration, one he'd been forced into after having a promising career as an artist curtailed by the draft. He held a degree from the University of New Mexico and had studied under the original Taos Society of Artists. When he got his draft letter, he was engrossed in his art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, where he was trying in earnest to convince himself that the war would somehow never reach him.

But where the draft threatened to close the door on one career, it also opened on another. Trading his "paintbrush for a bayonet" -- as Youngblood put it in a pamphlet published by the Washington County Historical Society in 1994 to coincide with a show of his wartime drawings and paintings -- he began chronicling his and the rest of his 155th Anti-Aircraft Battalion's experiences in impromptu drawings and watercolor paintings.

Capturing the emotions and story from the frontlines, Youngblood sent those works home to his mother. She in turn forwarded them to an Evansville newspaper, where they were published as war correspondence. They revealed not only a high level of technical skill but also a natural journalistic aptitude. Looking back on them now, it is not hard to see what made a newspaperman like Leech want to interview the artist.

Youngblood moved his wife, Marga, and their children into a house in Brookline.

At first, he was assigned the occasional news piece that needed but lacked a photo. He was the designated illustrator for a weekly column in the Sunday Roto magazine called "Modern Parables" by Fulton Oursler, author of the "The Greatest Story Ever Told." He also inherited the job of illustrating the "Odd Fax" column, a weekly set of four or five strange and entertaining facts about Pennsylvania that ran on Roto's first page.

On Oct. 26, 1947, Youngblood's painting of a scene from the century-old North Side farmer's market appeared on Roto's cover. An accompanying story by William Faust briefly retold the market's long history and profiled several farmers who had descended on the intersection of Robinson and Merchant streets in the North Side business district. The story's themes of country and urban life and the places where they intersect was one that would inform Youngblood's work throughout his time at the Press.

In February 1948, Youngblood framed a depiction of ice skaters in Panther Hollow with the Panther Hollow Bridge as a reminder of city life looming just above and beyond. And a July 24, 1949, cover depicts what appears to be two tomboys enjoying their tree house in the country -- except that a caption reveals the inspiration came from Youngblood's encounter with kids playing in one of Pittsburgh's many uninhabited ravines.

Joining the procession of Pittsburghers escaping to the country each weekend, Youngblood was also finding subjects for many of his Roto paintings during long drives with his family through rural Washington, Westmoreland, Butler, Bedford and Somerset counties. His storyboards, which were now getting center page treatment in Roto, profiled the seasonal rituals and lifestyles of country life just outside of Pittsburgh.

There was the Ligonier Valley foxhunt, maple syrup collecting in Somerset, logging in Cook Forest, skiing at Seven Springs and a plethora of folksy old barns. A crowded fee-fishing pond, while seasonally themed, tips its hat to the simple joys that modern life has diminished, while a profile on the picturesque and secluded village of Seldom Seen waxes nostalgic for an antiquated way of life. In scenes that resemble Evansville more than Pittsburgh, women convene at the centralized mailboxes while boys in their straw hats fish off a wooden bridge.

Throughout the 1950s, Youngblood was also regularly being called upon to paint the Renaissance projects transforming the Golden Triangle.

Between 1950 and 1960, the region saw seven major construction projects reach completion in the Downtown business district alone. Among the ones Youngblood painted include Gateway Center and a prospective of the Civic Arena, done from architectural drawings and printed in 1956. He also did a similar prospective, bird's-eye view painting of Point State Park in 1953 while the park was still under construction.

In one Roto cover called "Mount Washington ... Vision And An Opportunity," Youngblood depicts a handful of "suggestions" from "city planners" for beautifying the mountain's barren slopes.

Many of those "suggestions" never reached fruition, including a cable-supported tram, which the painting shows as having replaced the Duquesne Incline and running not just from top to bottom but also straight across the Monongahela. Boats dock just outside a hotel sitting along the shore and parks line its ridge. The site comes off as more than optimistic but also utopian, a kind of post-industrial success story.

But Youngblood took little joy in depicting the Renaissance projects that have since become indelible parts of Pittsburgh's landscape. He thought of them instead as publicizing the work of ambitious developers grabbing for a piece of the millions in state funding pouring into Pittsburgh.

Given his own choice -- as he often was by the mid-1950s, after being named art director -- Youngblood instead opted for subjects like grocer Sam Portney. A caption from the 1956 Roto cover depicting Portney explains that he was a regular sight around Downtown, where he used his horse-drawn cart to deliver produce to restaurants. In a scene that hardly resembles the popular mid-20th-century conception of smoky, hellish Pittsburgh, Youngblood's painting depicts a scene where children are feeding Portney's horse.

In the 1950s, Youngblood also began illustrating the Family Magazine section. His illustrations, accompanied by a common sense column by Norman Vincent Peale, regularly poked fun at modern conceptions of life and art.

Over the coming decades, as the Allegheny Conference continued pushing forward, Youngblood's artwork continued to push backward. And as the Allegheny Conference's misguided projects displaced the buildings, businesses and people that did not fit into its vision of Pittsburgh's future, Youngblood's paintings increasingly returned to idealized versions of country life and almost mythologized versions of Pittsburgh's history.

One Christmas cover from 1965 depicts a nameless farming community, a kind of amalgamation of various buildings and structures Youngblood had depicted previously, while a caption reads that it is "marked with an intimacy within families unknown in urban life." And another titled "Steps Towards Spring" reads that while "we approve of all the projects Pittsburgh has completed to add to its beauty ... a little fresh paint plus the green of spring-born leaves plus an attractive young woman add up to natural beauty, too."

In 1976, Youngblood created 10 paintings depicting pioneer life in the region, which all ran in Roto and later hung in the Fort Pitt Museum. He also that year wrote a piece about therapists at Western Psychiatric using art to reach the mentally ill.

In it he may have indicated the mission statement he eventually took on at the Press:

"Some talented and aesthetically inclined people in our era are saying that life itself is the 'art,' and artists can best function by pointing the way to a better quality of living."

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.