Franklin Morris Howarth was one of the earliest published American cartoonist and comic strip
artists and although exceptionally popular at the time now he's somehow managed to become
one of the least well known.
He was born in Philadelphia in 1864 and with no formal art training by the age of 19 he
was already getting his work published in several newspapers in the city.
Soon after he began working for American humour magazines such as Life,Judge, and Truth.
He joined the staff of Puck magazine in 1891, and they became his primary but not exclusive
vehicle of expression for the next 10 years or so.
Very quickly he gravitated to creating characters with big heads on little bodies, he never
involved himself with dialogue in speech balloons and all his strips were accompanied instead
by panels of narrative text.
His line work was his greatest strength and it was remarkably clean and calligraphic,
and although he did make use of light hatching techniques he did so with restraint and left
large areas of his images quite open and minimal.
In 1899 his collection of mostly colour comic strips, titled Funny Folks, was published
in both the USA and Britain, and this book brought him much greater recognition.
Arguably the success of this volume led to interest from William Randolph Heart's publishing
empire, and in 1902 Howarth signed a contract for his work to be widely syndicated across
the USA.
Among his early popular strips was on ingoing humorous account of the ups and downs of courtship
The Love of Lulu and Leander, created in 1902 for the New York American.
He enjoyed similar success with Mr. E. Z. Mark, which was first published in the American
Journal-Examiner in 1903. As the name suggests in every episode the central character was
fleeced in all manner of ways by a variety of con-tricks.
and this strip had a run of 5 years before the public tired of the same gag.
In 1906 Howarth created 'The Lad That Loved a Lady' which also ran as 'A Lad And His Lass'
but it was simply a re-run of his earlier Lulu and Leander strip with a medieval setting,
and only managed a run of a year.
He also created the strip Old Opey Dildock in 1907, which became arguably his most successful
and certainly longest running strip. But with one of life's terrible ironies it wasn' t
Howarth who benifited from its success.
Unfortunately in 1908 he fell ill with pneumonia and he died soon after at the age of only
43.
But the strip lived on, subsequently drawn by W. L. Wells and continued to be published
up to 1914.
Edward Penfield was born just 2 years later than Howarth in 1866 in Brooklyn, New York
and in his early 20s he enrolled at the city's Art Students League.
in 1890 at the age of 24 he was offered a job as an art editor and illustrator with
Harpers magazine.
And in 1893, he designed the first of what would be a large series of monthly posters
for the magazine. This series of striking gestural graphic images, which were created
as lithographs owed an obvious debt to the work of french poster artists, particularly
that of Toulouse Lautrec and Théophile Steinlen.
And compared to the work of others in the USA at that time they were considered to be
daringly modernist
Penfield claimed -not very credibly - to have been unaware of the work of the French poster
artists, despite the fact that only a year earlier he had visited Paris for an extended
study tour.
But whether the similarity was coincidental or not his images came to be inextricably
tied to the magazine's visual identity.
And despite his full time job with Harper's he also found time to take other commissions
for book illustration and other magazines and advertising work during this period of
his career.
In 1897 He married and the couple set up home in New York whre he created a stusio in the
top floor of the house.
By the turn of the century Penfield was working at harpers in multiple roles as art director,
manager, editor and artist, but in 1901 he decided to devote his time entirely to illustration
.
in addition to his ongoing advertising work he forged new relationships with other magazines
including the Saturday Evening Post and most significantly Collier's..
All his cover work for Colliers continued to be influenced by the French poster artists
and increasingly the work of Japanese woodblock printmakers, and by now his linear style was
becoming significantly heavier.
He was a keen traveller and following a trip to the Netherlands he wrote and drew a series
of articles based on his travels, which was also published in 1907 in book form as Holland
Sketches.
And after a few years back in the USA, he returned to Europe and travelled around spain
which resulted in 1911's equally successful Spanish Sketches.
In addition to his enduring career as an illustrator he also taught part time at the art students
league and when America entered World War I he created a series of dramatically composed
domestic propaganda posters.
Following the war there was no sign of Penfield becoming less popular, and he continued to
be prolific, creating yet more posters and other advertising work alongside his regular
work for Colliers.
But tragically in 1924 he injured his back in a fall, which rendered him unable to work
and only a year later he died from complications at the age of only 59.
In Germany illustrator Heinrich Vogeler is respected enough to merit his own museum but
elsewhere I think he is largely unknown.
Vogeler was born in Bremen in 1872 and in 1890 at the age of 18 he enrolled at the Düsseldorf
Art Academy
In 1894 with his studies behind him he moved to an artist's colony in Worpswede in rural
Saxony. There he created limited editions of his etchings but only with limited success.
But by 1897 he was also creating more commercial work including page decorations for The Explorer
and the Witch by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal
In 1898 he illustrated the Sunken bell written by Gerard Hauptmann and a year later he moved
to Munich, where there were many more publishers and correspondingly more opportunities for
commissions.
Among his new clients was the arts magazine Jugend for whom he created covers and page
illustrations, and he was much in demand as an illustrator of books for both adults and
children. He had particular success with his imaginatively illustrated and decorated colour
edition of the tales of the brothers Grimm in 1907, featuring fine line work, and sensitive
use of colour washes. But he continued to be diverse in his creative
pursuits and in addition to his ongoing work as an artist and illustrator he was simultaneously
working as a furniture designer in a workshop with his brother and even tirned his hand
to several artchitectural projects.
In 1911 he also created a series of line drawings to illustrate an edition of Oscar Wilde's
story The Happy Prince, and although this was a monochrome
project he once again used his pictorial expressive and decorative skills to bring the narrative
to life.
During the great war Vogeler fought and was injured in battle and the horrors he had witnessed
led him to publish an open letter to Kaiser Wilhelm pleading with him to surrender so
that peace could be restored.
This didn't go down too well and he was sent to a mental hospital. When he was subsequently
released he became even more openly dissident and was imprisoned, although only briefly.
At which point he set up his own commune and art school in Barkenhoff, which occupied much
of his time and energy.
in 1923 he visited the Soviet Union and when he returned to Germany he joined the KPD,
the German communist party of the time.
By 1927 his career had taken a downward turn, and he was struggling financially, so he worked
briefly as draftsman for an architectural office in Berlin.
In 1931 he left for Moscow and took up permanent residence there with his wife and he created
propaganda aimed against the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, alongside his now more expressinistic
painting and printmaking..
But After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 he was deported to Kazakhstan
by the Soviet authorities, and he died there in 1942 at the age of 70.
Ukrainian Nathalie Parain was born Natalia Tchelpanova in Kiev, in 1897.
in her later teens she studied drawing and painting at the Moscow school of fine arts.
But the 1917 revolution put an end to that institution and with no other options she
had to continue her studies at the newly established State Workshops of Moscow.
Once her studies were finished she taught drawing and art to children for a few years
e years but This was a long way from the career she had envisaged for herself,
in 1926 she met and married Brice Parain, the cultural attaché at the French Embassy
in Moscow.
And when he returned to Paris in 1928 she was only too glad to go with him, and once
they had relocated she seized the opportunity to find work as an illustrator in the French
capital.
She found a warm welcome from the publishing houses there and in 1930 her illustrated edition
of the children's book My Cat, written by by Andre Beucler was published, which quickly
became a success in France. And in the same year she published another
cat story, Anton Chekhovs Chataigne, originally written in 1887
Despite her early determination to get out of soviet Russia Parain's style was heavily
influenced by Russian constructivist art of the kind created by Malevich and Lebedev for
the Bolshevik publishing authorities. Conventional representation was not on her stylistic agenda,
and her blend of abstraction and folk art placed her among other early pioneers in children's
publishing who saw no reason to perpetuate the painted, more figurative conventions which
had been the norm since the later 1800s. In 1931 she published Je Découpe, and this
children's picture book was created using only simple cut out shapes as collage. And
much to the surprise of more traditionally inclined publishers it enjoyed immense success.
Most of her books were for the publisher Flammarion's Père Castor imprint. and she had another
major success with her visualisation of the Russian folk tale of Baba Yaga, published
in 1935. This series of radically modernist narrative images made great use of white space
and combined hand drawn imagery with cut out elements.
in the same year she published the first if what would become a series of instructional
books which actually capitalised on the simplicity of her approach and demonstrated techniques
for creating simple shapes which could nevertheless express narrative meaning.
Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s Parain's distinctive images were a ubiquitous presence
in children's publishing in France and she enjoyed popularity in other European countries
too. Some were cut out, some drawn and painted and some a combination of both. but All were
remarkably inventive and demonstrated the persistence of her creativity..
The last published book I've managed to track down is 1948's Les Chiens. And I'm very sorry
to have to report that Natalie Parain was yet another illustrator who didn't get to
have an old age and she died when she was 61 in 1958.
And on that even more than usually downbeat note I bid you goodbye until the next one
is uploaded.