...from various books that have been published for those who "collect" the kits from that era, the art was a pretty big deal.

One of the guys who did art for one of the American kitmakers, Monogram perhaps, went on to be a pretty famous military artist. I have to go back and look it all up again to remember who it was; I should recall, but...

It wasn't a unique story; several of them were pretty famous illustrators in their own right, the originals hung in galleries in the office buildings of many model companies, and people pay healthy sums for those paintings today, some rose to the same sort of level of esteem as artists like Cuneo.

Roy Cross was probably the most famous for Airfix. Unfortunately a lot of his original paintings for Airfix were lost, but many a boxtop are collected today. He was an academy artist, both in the Guild of Aviation Artists and the Royal Society of Marine Artists.

They weren't faceless nameless artists who just cranked this out in corporate bullpens, but each company had their one or two on retainer, and there seemed to be quite a bit of healthy competition between them far beyond mere packaging design in the manner of today.