The Origin of the Coupe

From Wikipedia: A coupé or coupe (from the French, coupé, to cut) is a closed two-door car body style with a permanently attached fixed roof. The precise definition of the term varies between manufacturers and over time.
Nowadays an automobile manufacturer can apply the term coupe to just about any car they want. For example: club coupe (2 door sedan), opera coupe (a limousine with a roof tall enough so occupants don't have to remove their top hats), sports coupe (car having a roof sloping down to the rear aka fastback), four-door coupe (luxury sedan with coupe-like proportions), quad coupe (car with one or two small rear doors) and so on.
For me, the coupe remains a body style most popular in the thirties and forties. All had only two doors and a very short roof. A bench seat would be fitted and two could ride in comfort, but you could cram in three in a pinch.
Three Window or Five Window
A three window coupe had two side windows and a back window. The five window had a slightly longer passenger compartment and added two more windows, one on each side behind the doors. That slightly longer cab left space for a package shelf behind the seat – something a three window would not have.
Many coupes featured an opening windshield. It was hinged on the top and you turned a crank mounted below the windshield in the centre. It only opened a few inches, but it did let in a lot of air. Of course the windows in the doors rolled down as well. If the car had a rumble seat* (let's save a full discussion of that for another blog), then the rear window would roll down to allow the two front passengers to converse with the poor souls riding out back. With all those windows open, who'd need air conditioning?
If you drove a coupe you were cool. Young married couples would have a coupe until the kids started arriving. Travelling salesmen loved coupes! When the cab was shortened, the trunk got longer – boy could you pack a lot of goods in there! Moonshiners and bootleggers loved coupes for the same reason, that huge trunk! Add to that coupes were lighter than their sedan counterparts, meaning they had noticeably peppier performance.
For me though, the major appeal of the coupe is that just looks better than any sedan. Sadly, by the late forties they had disappeared from most manufacturer's model lineup. Here's my digital painting based on a photo I took at the Nixdorf Museum in Summerland BC of a '48 Chyrsler New Yorker Coupe. And yes it's featured in my ebook, Digital Automotive Art on iTunes.

*A rumble seat, also called mother-in-law seat, is an upholstered exterior seat which hinges or otherwise opens out from the rear deck of a pre-World War II automobile, and seats one or more passengers.