Will Bradley was a massively successful and influential early American illustrator and
designer, and yet is seems his reputation has inexplicably faded over the years.
He was born 1868 in Boston, Massachusetts but his father died when Will was young and
he and his mother moved to Michigan, to be near other family members.
At the age of 12 he began an apprenticeship at a local weekly newspaper, and five years
later in 1885 he left for Chicago, where he worked initially as a wood engraver and typographer.
He moved back to Massachusetts and set up his own company The Wayside Press, where he
worked in the multiple roles of illustrator, editor, typographer, designer and manager
for an increasing number of commercial clients.,
Although he was actually a couple of years older, Bradley's style displayed a clear influence
of Aubrey Beardsley, as well as Japanese woodblock printing and the English arts and crafts movement.
In 1894 the book of poems When Hearts are Trumps by Tom Hall was published, and the
poster created by Bradley to advertise the book greatly enhanced his reputation.
in the same year his first cover design and poster for the literary magazine the Chap
Book appeared, and he would feature regularly on its covers and those of the trade magazine
The Inland Printer for years to come.
From this point on Bradley's success grew rapidly and he created many more illustrations
for books, magazines and posters using his highly recognisable woodcut style.
But working as a one man industry soon took its toll on his health and in 1896 when he
was only 28 years old he suffered a nervous collapse.
Once he had recovered he felt obliged to scale down his activities and he reluctantly sold
the Wayside Press.
In 1900 he briefly studied literature at Harvard and in the same year he began working for
Collier's magazine.
As with the Chap Book he created numerous decorative covers in the years that followed,
but as Collier's was a considerably more mainstream publication this work brought him much wider
recognition and popular acclaim.
In 1901 the Royal Doulton company began producing various ranges of themed plates featuring
Bradley's illustrations, which sold in large numbers.
And with the considerable amount of money now coming in Bradley had a fine house with
extensive studio space built in Concord, Massachusetts.
He was by now a revered figure in publishing and in the first decade of the 20th century
he wrote many articles on aspects of graphic design which were published in the Chap Book.
And he also embarked on a number of well attended lecture tours.
1906 saw the publication of his children's illustrated story Peter Poodle, which featured
his highly stylised figure work in two colour print and it proved to be a popular book across
the USA.
Between 1907 and 1910 he took the supposedly full time position of art editor of Colliers
magazine but it didn't prevent him from working independently on other projects on a freelance
basis.
He was in great demand for his poster work and it seems the buoyant bicycle industry
among others couldn't get enough of his powerful graphic imagery
The last dated work I've managed to find is this cover illustration for St. Nicholas magazine
from 1915, and it was in that year that Bradley started working in silent movies, and even
went into directing and running his own production company.
In 1930 he retired a very wealthy man to Pasadena, California and 32 years later in 1962 he died
at the age of 93.
American children's illustrator Milo Winter is another mysteriously well kept secret,
on this side of the Atlantic at least.
He was born in Princeton, Illinois in 1888 and with an obvious talent for drawing and
painting he later undertook formal art education at Chicago's School of Art.
His first illustrated book, which he also wrote, was Billy Popgun, published in 1912,
only a year after graduating.
This comic fantasy showed that Winter was already a confident and engaging visual stylist.
He had obviously been strongly influenced by British illustrators such as Rackham and
Dulac, and like them his illustration displayed a pronounced ability to blend fine descriptive
inked line with the application of tonal washes of watercolour.
Although he had written the text for Billy Popgun the books that followed were all commissions
to illustrate classic fantasies written by others.
The first of these was Gulliver’s Travels in 1912 , and his edition featured a series
of plausible and attractive watercolour visualisations to illuminate Swift's satirical narrative.
Winter was remarkably productive at this time, and Gulliver's Travels was quickly followed
in 1913 by more absorbing colour fantasy illustrations for Nathaniel Hawthorne's collection Tanglewood
Tales.
And a year later his remarkably evocative and frequently comedic visualisation of The
Tales of the Arabian Nights provided even more evidence of of the stylistic impact and
approach of Edmund Dulac's earlier edition of the same book
Winter's visualisation of Alice in Wonderland was published in 1916, and although it owed
an obvious debt to the visual templates created by Tenniel half a century earlier it was nevertheless
an attractive collection of watercolours with some agreeable absurdist touches.
But certainly among his most creatively successful work was his 1919 Aesop's fables for children,
which featured a series of engrossing and only slightly anthropomorphised animal characters
set in highly plausible rural scenery.
And unusually every one of the hundreds of illustrations he created for the book was
printed in full colour.
Winter continued to create illustration in the years that followed, but by the later
1930s there were clear signs that his stylistic approach had changed dramatically. He was
still working in line and tonal colour but the earlier British influence was gone and
All his later output used the painted technique typified by the the immensely successful Golden
Book series which had come to dominate children's publishing.
Between 1947 and 1949, he even worked as the art editor of the similarly inclined Childcraft
Books.
And Milo Winter moved to New York in the early 1950s and died there in 1956 at the age of
68.
Considering the volume, quality and diversity of French illustrator Lucien Boucher's work
there is a pitifully small amount of biographical information available.
He was born in the city of Chartres in 1889, and he later studied at the Sèvres School
of Ceramics.
He would have graduated some time around 1912 and although some sources refer to him working
as a fine artist I have found no physical evidence of this, or any other evidence of
his output before the mid 1920s.
In 1925 his heavily outlined lithographic illustrations featured in two books, Boutiques
and Boutiques de la Foire by Pierre Mac Orlan, and around the same time tonal illustrations
with a considerably lighter touch began appearing in the Parisian humour magazine Fantasio.
From the outset he was a diverse stylist, at home with any number of techniques and
applications.
1928 saw the publication of the classical Greek play The Birds by Aristophanes, with
images created by Boucher as almost tribal colour woodcuts.
In the same year his visualisation of the tales of Perrault was published, which was
also produced as woodcuts, but with a deliberately medievalist technique.
And 3 years later he created a series of even more medievally styled images for the work
of the 15th century writer François Villon.
But he also used more energetic and engrossingly chaotic contemporary styling in other publications
such as his 1936 edition of the Clochemerle stories written by Gabriel Chevallier, which
greatly enhanced the appeal of the comical narratives.
And many other books were published in the coming years which clearly demonstrated Boucher's
stylistic versatility, from brash and chaotic linear work to more sensitive etchings and
atmospheric tonal styling.
In the mid 1930s Boucher designed the first of what would be a large number of impressive
highly decorative posters for Air France, all of which were created using gouache paint.
In addition to the posters there was other publicity work too and His relationship with
the company would endure up to his death.
In the 1950s he also produced a series of cheerfully comedic flat colour posters designed
to entice the French public to buy tickets for the national lottery, and the campaign
was a great success.
By this time his ongoing association with Air France had led to the production of a
large volume of beautifully intricate decorative maps. These astonishingly detailed and absorbing
images were undoubtedly among his greatest and most enduring achievements.
And following a diverse and successful career of around half a century Lucien Boucher died
in 1971 at the age of 82.
Austrian illustrator Theo Matejko was born in Vienna in 1893, and there's nothing of
any substance recorded about his early life so the best I can do is pick up his story
in 1914 when he joined the Austrian army to fight in the Great War.
But his artistic abilities were soon noticed by a senior officer and Matejko spent the
rest of the war recording the conflict as an official war artist.
Even during the war Matejko was already creating posters for German and other European films,
and when it ended he carried on in this capacity for several years to come, and the many dramatic
images he created forged a strong reputation.
In 1920 he left for Berlin and he became a regular feature in the Berlin Illustrated
News. His work for the newspaper and other publications was invariably rendered in monochrome
and like most if his output it combined gestural tonal washes with equally lively drawing in
pencil or charcoal.
Posters continued to be a dominant aspect of his output throughout the 1920s.
Many were for yet more German silent films, including several for the highly respected
director Fritz lang, but there were also plenty of other opportunities to create commercial
posters for many other clients too.
Matejko was particularly enthusiastic about modern technology, especially motorbikes and
cars, and he became a regular presence at many European racing events, recording the
high speed action and creating posters, and even racing himself
In 1924 he was involved in a serious car crash, but the incident didn't dampen his enthusiasm
and he continued to record the drama of motor racing along with any number of other sporting
events.
In 1928 he was invited to travel onboard the first transatlantic flight of the airship
Graf Zeppelin, where he made an artistic record of the voyage which was published throughout
Germany.
As late as 1930 Matejko was drawing images for newspapers and magazines which were far
from friendly towards the rapidly rising Nazi party
But after they actually came to power in 1933, he either became an avid supporter of Hitler's
vision for a new Germany or created a very believable impression of one.
He continued to illustrate commercially but as the decade unfolded and war became increasingly
likely the amount of propaganda he created increased dramatically.
And by the time war began in 1939 he was working for the Nazi's Die Wehrmacht magazine and
creating posters illustrating grossly distorted versions of actuality in an attempt to control
the populations of the occupied countries.
It seems he suffered no repercussions for his wartime propaganda, but ironically it
was game over for him anyway as Matejko died of a stroke in 1946 at the age of only 53.
It's also over for this instalment and hopefully I'll see you again when the next one's ready.