How "Pregnant" was the 1929 Buick?

Once Harley Earl had been hired as General Motors' styling director, an early major project was to produce a design for the forthcoming 1929 Buick's new body.  When the cars reached dealers for the first time, there was a strong negative reaction to a slight bulge along the belt line, below the side windows.  That was because other brands featured body sides whose belt lines initiated curves that slightly tucked inwards as they fell away downwards.

Larry Edsall in Automotive News goes into more detail here.  According to most stories, including Edsall's, Earl reacted by claiming that body engineers altered his staff's design.  He used this (along with his friendship with Alfred P. Sloan) to gain final sign-off on future designs from his Art & Colour section.

I am a bit skeptical.  So far as I know, there is no visual evidence of the designs Art & Colour prepared for various Buick body types.  If this is so, then the matter cannot be resolved.  My guess is that Earl's design did have that bulge.  Checking with the styling history bible, "A Century of Automotive Style" by Michael Lamm and David Holls, I notice on page 91 that former Chrysler Corporation stylist Jeff Godshall is of the same opinion.  I base my case on the reasoning that body engineers, a conservative lot, would never think of making such a major departure from strong conventions of the time unless they were under instructions to do so.

We begin with four images of 1929 Buicks.  The notorious bulge is along the belt line.

Gallery

Now compare these Buicks to some other cars of its vintage ...

A 1929 Chevrolet.  Its body was designed around 1926-27 for the 1928 model year, so it has no real Harley Earl influence so far as I can tell.

A 1929 LaSalle.   Earl's first styling project with General Motors was the 1927 LaSalle line.  Its sides are typical of the times.

A 1928 Chrysler.  Chryslers competed with Buicks, and potential buyers of '29 Buicks would have been familiar with cars such as this.

1929 Dodge.  Its design probably pre-dates Chrysler's 1928 acquisition of Dodge.  I include this image to provide some more non-GM design context.

So yes, that Buick bulge was definitely out of the American car body design mainstream during the 1929 model year.

Hispano-Suiza and the 1927 LaSalle

The father of automobile manufacturer styling departments is Harley Earl, whose work designing bodywork for the 1927 LaSalle (a new companion brand to General Motors' Cadillac marque) led to his appointment as GM's styling director and the establishment of its Art & Colour Section.

A well-known factor in LaSalle's design was Earl's admiration for the appearance of Hispano-Suiza automobiles.  Michael Lamm and David Holls in their classic book "A Century of Automobile Style" report the Hispano - LaSalle connection as follows (p.87):

"Earl took inspiration for his 1927 LaSalle design from his favorite European marque, the Hispano-Suiza, and he made no bones about it.  He'd admired Hissos during his several trips to the Paris Salon in the late teens and early 1920s, and he later told Barbara Holliday of the Detroit Free Press, 'The Hispano-Suiza was the apple of my eye.  All the chic people who appreciated cars drove Hispanos.  They were very light as against the heavier models American companies were making, and every line meant something.'... Earl, in fact, kept a Hispano-Suiza radiator in his office for many years after the LaSalle's success, and a number of his early 1930s cars--particularly Cadillac-- also borrowed the Hispano grille shape and ornamentation."

I suppose it has been done before, except that I cannot remember ever seeing a comparison of mid-1920s Hispano-Suiza design to that of 1927 LaSalles.  So why not do just that here.

Gallery

1923 Hispano-Suiza H6B Dual-Cowl Tourer - Bonhams photo.

1924 Hispano-Suiza H6B Coupé de Ville by Saoutchik - Bonhams photo.

Front end of the same car - RM Sotheby's photo.

1925 Hispano-Suiza H6B Transformable Cabriolet by Belvalette - Bonhams photo.

Harley Earl at the wheel with Larry Fisher and 1927 LaSalle.

Harley Earl in his personal 1928 LaSalle.

1927 LaSalle roadster - publicity photo.

Indeed, Earl copied the Hispano-Suiza grille.  Almost the same are Hispano and LaSalle radiator-grille outlines.  Ditto the width of their bright metal surrounds.  The Hispano crest had wings, so Earl's LaSalle crest also had wings.  Comparisons for the rest of the bodies is difficult because post- Great War Hispano bodies, so far as I know (and I'm not a Hispano expert) were all custom built by coachbuilding firms.  That is, aside from the grille, hood, and perhaps fenders, there was no standard Hispano-Suiza body that Earl could have used for inspiration.