American cartoonist Albert Levering was born in Hope, Indiana in 1869.
His father was an architect and in his teens Albert studied with him, before embarking
on his own successful career in architecture.
But after 8 years in the profession he gave it up and from his early 30s onward
he worked as an illustrator, both as a staff artist and a freelancer for various publications,
including the Chicago Tribune and and the New York Sunday Tribune.
His strongest professional associations were with the leading humour magazines of the time,
and his work featured frequently in the pages and on the covers of Life magazine.
And the many satirical and technically exceptional images he created for them demonstrated conclusively
that architecture's loss was illustration's gain.
He also began a strong and enduring relationship with the the magazine Puck, where most of
his work was printed in colour, and his enduring popularity in both these magazines gave him
a reputation as one of the finest comic illustrators of his time.
Levering was of the generation who had grown up with no expectation of working in colour
and even in later years most of his illustration for Life magazine was monochrome only.
But his disciplined use of pen and ink gave his work astonishing three dimensional plausibility,
which combined with his talent for creating complex, detailed crowd scenes made for particularly
pleasing and engaging images.
Despite his obvious talent for detailed ink shading he was more content than most to keep
things simple.
Many of his smaller spot illustrations such as those he created for the book Grimm Tales
Made Gay in 1902 were every bit as amusing as his more rendered work, with a spontaneous
appeal all of their own.
Some of the covers and page illustrations he created for Life magazine also favoured
a simpler graphic approach and he used a heavier linear technique reminiscent of the French
cartoonist Caran D'Ache.
But his inking for Puck generally continued to employ the highest quality of render, and
when it came to colour, like virtually all his comedic contemporaries transparent tonal
washes of watercolour were applied to what had been created as a fully finished monochrome
in pen and ink.
In 1918 Puck ceased publication and the loss of this longterm association left a rather
large hole in Levering's client base.
And although Life would continue to be published for almost 20 more years before its own collapse
his work for them seems to have evaporated around the same time.
I've been unable to track down any verifiable work at all by him from this point onward.
Whether he overcame this setback or was plunged into poverty or even decided to retire
is anybody's guess.
All I can tell you with any confidence is that he died in 1929 at 60 years old and has
become poorly remembered.
French illustrator Charles Laborde was born in 1886 into a very wealthy French family
who ran an import and export business in Argentina.
The family returned to their château in France soon after he was born but in 1901 his father
died suddenly and Charles’ older brother took over the management of the family business.
A couple of years later Laborde enrolled at both the Académie Julian and l’École des
Beaux Arts in Paris to pursue his artistic ambitions.
In 1905 his mother and brother decided to sell both the family château and business
and consequently at the age of only 19 Laborde inherited enough money to live on in comfort
for many years.
Although this meant he had no need to work he nevertheless set himself up in an expensive
studio in Montmartre and began taking commissions from several magazines including Le Rire and
its rival Le Sourire.
He also spent a lot of his time and energy to pursuing a dissolute hedonistic lifestyle
in both Paris and London, and it was in London he was given the cockney nickname Chas.
When the war began in 1914 Laborde enlisted and fought in the trenches but he was the
victim of a poison gas attack in 1917.
This and the deaths of several close friends and two of his brothers left him permanently
traumatised and damaged.
His drinking became even heavier and it didn't take long before he he became a chronic alcoholic
and he deserted his wife and child soon after.
Despite his consumption of alcohol he continued working for Parisian magazines and he also
illustrated several books by contemporary French authors.
Laborde's stylistic approach was highly distinctive and ignored the conventions of representational
illustration.
His disjointed expressive work had far more in common with the contemporary art world
than it did with other illustrators.
He used pen and ink, watercolour and crayon for much of his his commercial illustration
but many of the his images were created as sold as limited edition prints and were predominantly
hand coloured etchings and aquatints. But like Toulouse Lautrec before him he spent
increasing amounts of time drinking and hanging around the less than savoury Parisian brothels.
In addition to paying for the company of the prostitutes he would also appear in court
on their behalf, and he regularly gave away more of his his money to pay their debts,
legal expenses and fines.
His drawings of their distinctly unglamorous world were later published as a book with
text by Francis Carco titled L’Ami des Filles, in 1921.
And it's from this point on that his inevitable downward spiral began.
In the early 20s all the magazines lost patience with his unreliability and unpredictability,
although he was still illustrating the occasional book.
Between 1924 and 1930 Laborde travelled extensively and he published three albums of his impressions
of life in Paris, London and Berlin.
These limited edition books were never going to be bestsellers and they brought in little
income. And by this point he needed it. He had by
now squandered almost all his inheritance and his drunken unreliability had rendered
him completely unemployable.
In the late 1930s he travelled to Moscow, and then to Madrid at the height of the civil
war.
The drawn record he published of these trips fared even worse than his earlier albums and
as the decade ended he was selling drawings for whatever people were prepared to give
him.
In 1941 his liver and war damaged lungs finally gave up the struggle and he died in Paris
aged 55
Severo Pozzati was another illustrator who started out as an artist and fell back on
illustration when plan A had failed.
He was born in Comacchio in Northern Italy in 1895 and 2 years later the family moved
to Bologna .
He later studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there, and had some limited early success
with both his painting and sculpture.
He was exempt from military service in the Great War due to an injury he had sustained
some years before.
But during the war his art career collapsed and he reluctantly joined the advertising
agency where his older brother already worked.
In 1920 he moved to Paris, hoping to rekindle interest in his art.
But within a few months he was back with the same agency, this time in their Paris studios.
In 1923 he began using the alias Sepo on his poster illustrations and it was with that
name that he became successful.
His early work displayed a fairly obvious influence from the colossally successful Leonetto
Capiello, but then so did many others at that time in Italy.
But as the decade progressed so did Pozzati, and his images became far more radically styled,
displaying increasing elements of Cubism and the Italian art movement Futurism.
And it was no coincidence that Art Deco was beginning to take hold in Italy at the time.
At the end of 1924 he started working on a freelance basis for other agencies in Paris
and elsewhere in Europe, while still retaining a strong presence in Italian advertising.
In 1926 he signed a contract to work as artistic director for the Dorland agency and while
there he had many successes, such as his work for Noveltex in 1928.
Pozzati had never completely abandoned his artistic aspirations and ironically his success
in advertising led to renewed interest in his art.
In 1928 he exhibited his prints and paintings and the work was well received.
When his contract with Dorland expired in 1932 he decided to open his own advertising
agency in Paris.
And it was with this new agency that he created some of his most attractive and enduring work.
He had hijacked the Noveltex account from Dorland, so there was plenty of work coming
from that source and he picked up quite a few other major accounts throughout the 1930s.
But In 1939 the second world war began and in 1940 all Italians in Paris - including
Pozzati - were rounded up and held captive in internment camps.
He was released a few weeks later but he was unable work until the war ended.
When it did come to an end Pozzati re-energised his Paris business very quickly and within
a couple of years was as busy as ever, generating more iconic posters for the widest range of
clients in a style which had been futuristic enough to still look up to date.
In 1957 he returned to Italy and in 1960 he gave up all commercial work and devoted himself
exclusively to painting up to his death in Bologna in 1983 at the age of 86.
Julian de Miskey was born in Hungary in 1898, but some sources refer to him as being French
and I’m assuming that's down to one or both of his parents.
The family emigrated to the United States in 1914 and settled in Ohio.
In 1917 he left for New York to study at the Art Students League, and within a year of
starting his studies he had this early attempt at realism published on the cover of the Saturday
Evening Post.
At which point all evidence of his work disappears until 1923, when he was creating
covers and page illustrations for the communist magazine The Liberator, now in a distinctly
German Expressionist style.
But only a year later in 1925 his first cover for the newly launched New Yorker magazine
was published and it's difficult to imagine that this could be the work of the same illustrator.
And with this harshly geometric but amusing cartoon style he fit right in with the magazine's
Jazz Age and Art Deco ethos.
Most of the artists working for the magazine were creating similar modernist images but
few took it quite as far as De Miskey at this time.
Many more of his covers appeared in rapid succession and he also created monochrome
spot illustrations and jokes for the magazines pages.
It's unlikely that the New Yorker would have been his only source of income and he did
have some minor success with his Cubist paintings but I've found no evidence of commercial work
for other clients apart from this solitary line only press ad.
De Miskey had already demonstrated a chameleon-like ability to change his style and by the later
1920s he was undergoing yet another transformation, although this time it was more evolutionary
in nature.
The line work became more expressive although it remained fairly geometric, but the application
of colour was now frequently tonal and enhanced with crayon shading
Similarly his monochrome work for the inside pages also became more gestural and organic.
And although he stuck with this style for quite a few issues of the magazine it wasn't
the end of his move away from the geometric.
And by the mid 1930s he had begun to create even more painterly expressive pictures.
They were now fully fledged ink and watercolour wash illustrations which were not conventionally
representational but they were far less formal and more emotionally accessible to the readers
of the magazine.
And finally this came to be his defining style throughout the 1940s and into the 50s.
For the best part of 30 years De Miskey had been a regular feature with the New Yorker,
and his evolving stylistic approach had enabled him to have a far longer run than other contributors.
But eventually the New Yorker moved on to younger illustrators and newer styles and
with his safety net gone he migrated towards children's book work in the later 1950s.
The books he illustrated enjoyed reasonable success but nothing left a lasting impression,
and in the final analysis it's the work for the New Yorker which constitutes his legacy.
He stopped working in 1968 and Julian De Miskey died 8 years later in 1976 at the age of 78.
That's four more off the list and another four will be coming soon
See you then