Austrian Sergius Hruby was both an artist and an illustrator, and arguably more the
former than the latter, and in his case there was little perceptible difference between the two.
There isn't much recorded about his life but he was born in Vienna in 1869
and at the age of 20 he joined the Austrian army.
At some point in the mid 1890s he went to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
and he subsequently took a job teaching at a technical art school in the city.
There isn't a vast amount of illustration by him from this time,
and this appointment suggests he was successful enough as an artist and illustrator
to be offered the job but not so successful that he could afford to not take it.
So with the financial security and prestige of his academic position
he continued to involve himself in painting, printed art and illustration.
And there's evidence that he also created designs
for jewellery and household objects around this time.
In the first decade of the 20th century quite a few of his images were reproduced as postcards,
and they enjoyed great success throughout Austria,
in a period when postcards were the text messages of the day.
Commissions became increasingly frequent, and he created book illustrations, a small number
of posters and ex libris bookplates for wealthy clients and acquaintances
Although Hruby was already 45 years old when the first world war began he served in the
Austrian army as a first lieutenant. But he was injured during battle and sent home to recover.
Although his painted art was most usually created using oil paint,
both his colour and tonal monochrome illustrations were created with ink line and washes of gouache.
With pen and ink he was the equal of just about any of his contemporaries
and his graceful compositions recalled the work of Beardsley,
as well as an obvious leaning toward the more embellished ornate qualities of Rococo art.
In the 1920s his first illustration for the Austrian satirical magazine Die Muskete
was published, and given that humour was totally absent in his illustration
Hruby doesn't seem to have been the most obvious of choices.
Nevertheless his images were reproduced regularly in its pages for the best part of a decade,
even if many were reprints of his earlier work.
But Hruby continued to illustrate and paint throughout the 1930s into his later years,
and despite the turmoil taking place in Austria as the Nazi party took over
he resolutely stuck with the fantasy images which had made his reputation.
Despite his immense contribution to the graphic arts The Austrian Nazi party,
with typical ideological stupidity,
refused to recognise his achievements simply because his wife had been born Jewish.
And Sergius Hruby passed away in 1943 at the age of 74.
Harry Eliott was the very English sounding pseudonym
of French illustrator Charles Edmond Hermet.
He was born in Paris in 1882, the son of a lithographer.
And as he grew up for unknown reasons he developed a serious case of Anglophilia,
and not only did he start using the name Harry Eliott but he also tried
to pass himself off as the very essence of an English gentleman.
I can find no record of a formal art education, but in the early years of the 20th century
he started creating illustrations for a number of publications including Le Sourire, and La
Revue Illustrée. And he also produced quite a volume of advertising work
in the form of posters and postcards for a variety of commercial clients, some of them English.
From the beginning it was obvious that he had absorbed the influence both stylistically and
in terms of his favoured subjects of the English illustrators Randolph Caldecott and Cecil Aldin.
Hunting, in its ludicrously mannered British sense, was easily Eliott's most frequent topic,
and he generally approached his subject with good natured humour
combined with a strong aesthetic sensibility.
All his illustrations were created as ink line and watercolour wash,
And although it was hunting and horses which dominated his output
he also produced quite a few light-hearted images featuring the novelty of travel by motor car.
But despite his bid to be considered English he was called up for the French army in 1914,
and although he survived physically he had to
be treated for depression when he returned to civilian life.
Not long after the war he married and he and his wife actually lived in England for a few years.
Eliott actually created many of his images effectively as art,
rather than as commissioned work. I don't know if he sold many of the painted originals
but many of his scenic works were mass reproduced as relatively cheap prints
to be hung on the walls of modest households, and they sold in large numbers in France and Britain.
But despite the success this brought him he also continued to be in demand for any advertising work
which traded on the appeal of nostalgia and he created many
similarly themed pieces for publication in the magazine Le Chasseur Français.
And throughout the 1930s he also became a popular choice to illustrate editions of
classic tales for the publishers Hachette and their Biblioteque Verte imprint.
In 1940, he and his wife moved to a village in Normandy where they resided
for the rest of their lives, and Harry Eliott died at the age of 77 in 1959.
Ida Rentoul Outhwaite was born Ida Rentoul in Melbourne Australia in 1888, and I can't
find any information about her life before 1903, when at the age of 15 she had some illustrations
for a series of fairy stories written by her sister Anne published in a magazine.
The next year the sisters collaborated on Mollie's Bunyip,
a very popular book filled with fairies and elves in a recognisably Australian setting.
And to capitalise on its success Mollie's Staircase appeared in 1906.
Outside her usual collaborative partnersuip with her sister there was also illustration
for Tarella Quin's Gum Tree Brownie and other Faerie Folk of the Never Never a year later.
And in the same year she produced the first volume of Australian Songs for Young and Old,
with lyrics written by her sister Anne..
And demonstrating that they were as prolific as they were creative
the sisters had yet another popular success with The Lady of the Blue Beads in 1908.
The following year Ida married Arthur Grenbry Outhwaite
and during the following decade gave birth to and raised 4 children.
Consequently her illustration career slowed down somewhat, but despite the demands of motherhood
she continued to be published, with books such as Tarella Quin's Before the Lamps Are Lit in 1911.
Up to this point all her book work had been line only but in 1916 she brought
out her first full colour work, Elves and Fairies, written once more by her sister Anne.
The success of the book, with its delicate water-colour plates,
was due primarily to Ida's artistic talent but also to the business acumen of her husband,
who provided a £400 subsidy to ensure the highest quality of print, paper and binding.
She travelled to Europe in 1920, and exhibited successfully in Paris and London.
And while in Britain she signed a contract with the publishers A. & C. Black to produce five books
over the next decade. These included The Enchanted Forest in 1921, which was written by her husband,
and the massively popular The Little Green Road to Fairyland a year later.
in 1926 she provided illustrations for the book Fairyland, written by both her
husband and her sister, but despite its undoubted qualities the book fared less well than expected.
Her contract with A & C Black ended in 1930 with Bunny and Brownie:
The Adventures of George and Wiggle, and in 1933 her comic strip Benjamin Bear
was first published in a Melbourne weekly newspaper and ran up to 1939.
In the meantime she subsequently moved to another publisher,
but she only produced two books for them.
The first was A Bunch of Wild Flowers in 1933, and in 1935 she published Sixpence to Spend,
but neither of them enjoyed anything like the success she had known previously
and no more books followed.
Her later years were far from happy as her husband died in 38
and both her sons were killed in action in World War 2.
And following these tragic losses she lived
with her sister up to her death at the age of 72 in 1960.
Jon Whitcomb was born in 1906 in Oklahoma,
although at some stage during his childhood the family relocated to Wisconsin.
Both his parents were art teachers and naturally enough they encouraged him in
his youth to draw and paint, and it soon became obvious he had inherited their artistic DNA.
Which makes it all the more bizarre that at 18 he went to study English at Ohio State University.
Despite this perverse decision he apparently continued to pursue his interest in drawing
and painting and even found paid work as an illustrator in his summer break.
Unfortunately I've been unable to find any evidence of this earlier work.
After graduation with his degree in English he assembled a portfolio of the drawings he had
created during his years at college and found a job in a commercial art studio,
where he set about learning from the older, more established artists already there.
In 1934 he moved to New York City, where he became a leading light of the Charles E. Cooper studio.
And in the second half of the decade his illustrations appeared regularly
on covers and in the pages of several national magazines published in the city, and he also
quickly established himself as a popular choice for the ad agencies of Madison Avenue.
And this would be the pattern for the rest of his career.
Whitcomb's style was a natural progression from the more formal
precise painted technique typified by Rockwell and his contemporaries,
and although his work was clearly representational he was far more
expressionistic in his application of paint and far less interested in faithful background detail.
And it was as he moved away from using oil paint in favour of gouache that his work developed a
more modernistic visual energy, and he became one of the earliest illustrators to pursue a
style which would come to define a large volume of American illustration in the 1950s and 60s.
During World War 2 he joined the navy and served as a lieutenant,
and as well as his regular duties he created quite a few recruitment posters,
the vast majority of which could fairly be accused of being misleadingly glamorous.
Once the war ended he returned to civilian life and quickly picked up where he had left off.
He continued to appear on the cover of Colliers and he became even more prolific,
illustrating covers and fiction for other magazines including Cosmopolitan
And in the postwar years he was equally in demand for advertising work, and he
was a ubiquitous presence in many high profile campaigns
involving press ads, posters and billboards for major American clients.
Whatever its commercial function the primary focus in virtually all his illustration
was the characters in any given narrative,
and most commonly he painted attractive young women or young passionate couples, frequently
reducing the background to simple design elements with which to frame and compose the figures.
And such was his reputation and level of popular success he was selected as one of
the founding faculty of the Famous Artists School established by Albert Dorne in 1948.
Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s his career continued undiminished, and
in later life He finally used that English degree and authored and illustrated two children's books,
Coco the Far Out Poodle and Pom Pom's Christmas
The last dated work I found is from the mid 1960s,
and I don't know when or even if he retired but Jon Whitcomb died at the age of 82 in 1988.
Thanks as ever for watching and all being well
there will be more coming in the not too distant future.