Although he spent his adult life working in America, Oliver Herford was born in Sheffield
in the North of England in 1860.
In 1876 when he was 16 years old he left England for America and his family relocated to Chicago.
Having shown a pronounced talent for both visual art and creative writing Herford travelled
back to England at the age of 19 to attend the Slade School of Art in London, and he
followed this with more study at the Académie Julian in Paris.
With his studies completed he headed back to America and set himself up in New York,
where all the major book and magazine publishers had their offices.
And it was from there that he established and developed his reputation as an illustrator
and writer of witty prose and verse. He even scripted a couple of successful plays.
The humour magazine Life was first published in 1883 and within a couple of years Herford
was among those contributing pen and ink illustrations, and although he was never what you would call
a frequent contributor his illustrations continued to appear in its pages and on its covers for
the next 3 decades.
His early work had to be translated through engraving for reproduction, but when photolithography
became more widely used he developed a lighter, more spontaneous technique.
In 1894 he published his illustrated book of verse Artful Anticks, which featured a
large volume of amusing pen and ink spot illustrations.
And this was followed a year later by a series of particularly accomplished full page monochromes
for Joel Chandler Harris's book Mister Rabbit at Home, and the success of this book greatly
increased his visibility and popularity.
in 1898 he both wrote and illustrated The Bashful Earthquake, a collection of absurd
frivolous verse accompanied by equally whimsical line illustrations.
His Alphabet of Celebrities was published in 1899 and this book marked a change in his
stylistic approach, with a series of much blockier woodcut style pen drawings.
And he persisted with this more graphic approach for 1900's A Child's Primer of Natural History,
which featured simple but descriptive monochromes of amusing animals alongside his comic verses
on the facing pages.
In 1904 he branched out stylistically again with The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten with
illustrations which were created with wax crayon directly onto lithographic stone.
The use of this technique created a whole new stylistic persona in his work, and he
returned to it soon after for The Kitten's Garden of Verses.
Herford's success as both a writer and illustrator of books continued throughout the early decades
of the 20th century, with any number of projects including a 1917 line only edition of Alice
in Wonderland and as time went on increasingly appeared in several popular magazines, including
the Ladies' Home Journal.
Frequently these images were published in full colour. And in their creation he didn't
rely on an inked line, but instead used carefully applied tonal application to create the illusion
of depth and substance.
For the rest of his career Herford continued to enjoy popular and critical success, and
as well as several more illustrated books his amusing full colour sequential series
about the misadventures of the couple Jill and Toby ran in the Mentor magazine for several
years into the 1930s.
But its run came to an end when after a lifetime of productive creativity Oliver Herford died
at the age of 75 in 1935.
Charles Genty was a French illustrator and artist who worked successfully in paint, pen
and ink, wood engraving and etching. But very few now know his name, even in France.
He was born in 1876 in the town of Jargeau, near Orleans.
In his late teens he briefly studied art with the painter Fernand Cormon but subsequently
enlisted as a soldier in the French army in 1896.
After his spell in the army he returned to civilian life and seemingly without too much
effort he quickly landed several major clients from magazine publishing in Paris.
Among them were Le Rire and La Baionette, both of which kept him in regular work.
And in 1902 the book Bonshommes de Paris by André Beaunier was published featuring illustrations
by Genty, and this gave his growing reputation an additional boost.
But at this point it was work for magazines which dominated his output
When war came in 1914 he fought at the front against the Germans, and the atrocities he
witnessed led to an understandable lifelong hatred of all things Germanic.
Despite being a combatant he also found time to create some rather cheerful takes on military
life during wartime, which were published in La Baionnette.
Once the war had ended Genty carried on with his magazine work but he also began producing
illustrations for novels, many of which were editions of the classic works of Honoré de
Balzac.
For these books he chose to create many of his images, although not all of them, as etchings.
And some were printed in colour but most were monochrome.
There were full page illustrations and spot illustrations dotted throughout these volumes
and Genty was particularly adept at creating plausible environments and atmospheres using
his loose but expressive linear technique.
His magazine illustrations were usually reproduced as full colour from his pen and watercolour
wash originals, which generally utilised restrained naturalistic colour palettes.
Despite their cartoon styling the observational attention he paid to the detail in the setting
of most of his work was nothing short of meticulous, and these images endure as accurate and absorbing
evocations of French urban and rural life during the 1920s and 30s.
But however accurate they were he was one of the earliest to employ the deceptively
casual technique which evolved into what became known in continental Europe as the clear line
school.
Given Genty's enduring hostility towards Germany it seems strange that he seems to have
left the subject alone in the work he produced during the Second World War.
And it was book illustration which by now had come to dominate his output.
In 1944 his edition of George Sand's La Mare au Diable was published with
24 absorbing and atmospheric engravings in both colour and monochrome.
The last work published in in his lifetime was an edition of Balzac's La Vieille Fille
in 1951, and Charles Genty died in Paris in 1956 at
the age of 79.
British poster artist Frank Newbould was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire in 1887, and he
studied graphics at the city's school of art between 1905 and 1908.
He worked for a couple of years in the art department of a local publishers, which gave
him invaluable experience of the possibilities and limitations of the print process.
In 1911 he moved to London to continue his art studies at Camberwell School of Art
but when the Great War started in 1914 he joined the army and fought in France.
He managed to return unscathed to civilian life when it was all over, and in 1919 he
set up a studio in London, from where he mainly produced monochrome magazine illustration.
But in 1921 he began to create colour posters for London Transport, and this body of work
set the stylistic tone and nature of his future output
He had been impressed by the graphic power of posterisation found in the work of earlier
modernists such as the Beggarstaffs, Lucien Bernhard and Ludwig Hohlwein.
And with his own background working with print he had a natural affinity for creating similarly
impossible to ignore images.
In addition to the many commissions he was given by the transport company in 1924 he
also designed a series of even more compelling posters for the Empire Marketing Board.
This prestigious commission involved him travelling to a number of exotic far-flung locations
to produce sketches and studies which would inform the the eventual series of posters.
2 years later he also began producing posters for the London & North Eastern Railway which
advertised the various destinations the company travelled to.
Newbould was one of 5 illustrators who were each given a contract to create 5 posters
a year for a fee of £500, which translates as a none too generous 30,000 pounds or 40,000
dollars at the time of writing.
But again his expenses were paid to travel and stay at the admittedly less exotic locations
than those of the Empire commission.
Virtually all his images continued to make use of varying degrees of non-naturalistic
posterised colour, which frequently bordered on the positively psychedelic.
Most of these were as you would expect images of figures interacting with the usually dramatically
composed landscape but on occasion he branched out into more playful hmuorous images such
as his East Coast Frolics series.
During World War 2, Newbould worked for the war office, creating propaganda mateeal, including
a series of posters which were romantic evocations of British landscapes, designed to fill the
civilian population with patriotic pride.
After the war he continued to work as a poster artist for rail companies and other clients,
but unfortunately Newbould's wife died in 1947 and four years later in 1951 he too left
early at the age of only 64.
Biographical information about children's illustrator Dorothy M. Wheeler is in particularly
short supply, but fortunately there are plenty of examples of her work.
She was born in an unspecified location in Southeast England in 1891 and there's no record
of her family circumstances.
She went on to study at Blackheath School of Art, and she would most likely have completed
her studies around 1915.
In which case she obviously found commissions soon after leaving art school because her
illustrated edition of The book of English Nursery Rhymes, written by Lavinia Edna Walter
was first published in 1916.
And this book featured Wheeler's delicate charming watercolours as full page illustrations
set within detailed linear borders to accompany the rhymes as actual sheet music to be played
and sung.
4 years later a series of her charming fairy-themed watercolours was published as a set of postcards,
which also proved to be very popular with the British public.
More books of fairy and woodland fantasy followed in the next two decades, all of which featured
her finely controlled calligraphic line work, and bright washes of tonal watercolour.
In 1939 she was chosen to illustrate her first Enid Blyton book, The Enchanted Wood.
And later in the same year she illustrated another, The Little Tree-House.
For younger viewers and those in other countries who are probably unaware of Blyton she was
easily the most popular British children's author of the 20th century, so this association
greatly enhanced Wheeler's reputation.
Although The work she created for the Blyton books generally continued to use the same
method as her earlier output, the line work became bolder and the application of colour
more simplistic than previously. Whether this was her decision or that of the publisher's
I don't know, but it did serve to make her style more contemporary, even if not as sensitive.
For the next quarter of a century Wheeler continued to illustrate an astonishing volume
of Blyton stories.
Quite a few of these were series of books about particular characters, and they appeared
in a number of different formats, using full and spot colour as well as monochrome line.
And the immense success of the books inevitably led to other printed material including playing
cards and calendars based on the characters from the various stories she illustrated.
It seems that the only time in her later career that Wheeler created anything that wasn't
connected to Blyton was when she wrote and illustrated her own version of the 3 Little
Pigs in 1951.
But she was still illustrating Blyton books up to the year she died in 1966 at the age
of 75.
And that's the end of another instalment, and I hope our paths converge again when the
next is uploaded.