Franz Von Bayros was born in 1866 in Zagreb, Croatia which at the time was part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In fact he was the Marquis of Zagreb, a member of a wealthy and aristocratic family.
At the age of 17 he was admitted to the Vienna Academy, where he received his formal art
education.
And in no hurry to make a living he subsequently continued to study as an apprentice to a couple
of popular artists of the period.
He married in 1896 but soon after it was annulled for reasons unknown, and he relocated to Munich
in the following year.
At that time Munich was the undisputed creative hub of the Germanic regions and Von Bayros
understood that to further his artistic ambitions working in the city was virtually mandatory.
In 1904, by which time he was already 38 years old, he gave his first exhibition of prints
and watercolours, and in the wake of its success he started to take commissions for ex libris
book plates for the libraries of the wealthy. Many of these, like much of the work that
followed were created using particularly fine pen and ink drawing with monochrome washes
overlaid to add shade and modelling.
A large number of these designs were also a clear indication of Von Bayros's fascination
with erotic imagery, and he rapidly developed a reputation for such subject matter with
a number of illustrated editions of notoriously explicit novels including a 1906 visualisation
of John Cleland's 18th century Memoirs of Fanny Hill.
But this wasn't quite his exclusive domain and in the same year he also published a more
respectable interpretation of Tales from the 1001 Nights.
And this collection was printed in full colour and featured some particularly attractive
and absorbing watercolour wash work combined with his expressive fine line.
During the first decade of the 20th century he made several trips to Paris, Venice and
Rome and the clear influence of Baroque and Rococo art was obvious in his illustration.
And so was the influence of his British contemporary, the decadent Aubrey Beardsley, who shared
Von Bayros's fascination for sexually themed illustration.
And this influence was particularly evident in Von Bayros's line only monochromes for
two Italian classics, The Pentameron and The Decameron in 1909 and 1910 respectively.
Unfortunately for Von Bayros in 1911 his obsession with the sins of the flesh led to scandal
and catastrophe when he published his most controversial sexually explicit work, Tales
from the Dressing Table.
This collection, from which these are fairly mild examples, was published under a pseudonym,
but nevertheless he was arrested, tried and banned from ever returning to Germany.
So he travelled reluctantly to Vienna and although he now found the going much harder
he still had some clients who continued to provide him with commissions.
When the allies won the Great War in 1918 Von Bayros sank into a profound depression,
and it wasn't until 1921 that he resumed work with an ambitious project to produce 60 watercolours
for Dante's Divine Comedy .
This remarkable body of dramatic and accomplished pen and watercolour images received rapturous
reviews and their creative success and critical acclaim was sufficient to overshadow the lingering
scandal of his trial and banishment. And Although he was still creating his erotic
portfolios into the 1920s this was his last significant and arguably greatest achievement
and in 1924 Von Bayros died of a brain haemorrhage in Vienna at the age of 58.
For reasons I can’t imagine it's particularly difficult to find any information whatsoever
about children's illustrator Frank Adams. And the search isn't helped by the existence
of an even more obscure American illustrator of the same name, born in 1914.
And due to the pronounced lack of information I should confess there is more than likely
only occasional connection between the visuals and narration.
Adams was born in 1871 somewhere in England.
And other than this there's nothing at all until 1900, when his book The Frog He Would
A-Wooing Go was first published.
Given that he would have been 31 at the time its highly likely there would have been earlier
work but that's just speculation.
The book gathered together a mix of beautiful watercolour paintings and quite a few more
monochromes, all of which displayed charm and humour, and a real talent for narrative
illustration for children.
He favoured a particularly clean and expressive linear approach which had little need of hatching
techniques to embellish it.
And in colour he usually worked over the line with a blend of flatter and more highly rendered
areas in watercolour which gave his images a distinctive graphic solidity.
Unfortunately, following this book there's another absence of evidence until 1909's Arthur
and the Boilybird, written by W. Gurney Benham.
Like a host of others Adams also created an edition of Alice in Wonderland in 1912, and
although it featured a series of well executed watercolours there was little to distinguish
it from the competition at that time. But in the same year he published Sam the
Sportsman, which was a more distinctive collection of comedic hunting scenes set to verse.
His book Old time Rhymes was published in 1915, and it contained yet more evidence of
his ability to create light humorous narratives of immense visual attraction.
Many others followed in the coming years, including Favourite Nursery Rhymes in 1917.
Apparently he was also quite successful as a watercolour painter but I haven't found
a single piece of evidence.
throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s Adams continued to publish his collections of rhymes
and stories and he also produced individual re-workings of specific nursery tales such
as the Three Little Pigs.
Among the many things I don't know about Frank Adams is when his last book was published
and all I can offer is that he died somewhere in England in 1944 at the age of 71.
Although British, Joyce Dennys was born in 1893 in India, where her father served as
an officer in the Army.
But when he retired from military life in 1896 the family returned to England and settled
in Eastbourne on the Southern coast.
A few years later the family relocated to Devon and when old enough Joyce enrolled at
Exeter Art School.
She then began further art study in London, but this was interrupted by the outbreak of
war in 1914.
She then joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment nursing scheme, and recorded comical accounts
of her experiences such as the 1916 book Our Hospital ABC with verses by Hampden Gordon
and M.C. Tindall.
She also illustrated a book of rhymes called Our Girls in War Time and Rhymes of the Red
Triangle in 1917 and 1918, as well as some recruitment posters for the War Office.
After the war she married in 1919 at the age of 26 and emigrated to Australia, where her
work was published in several magazines and books.
A couple of years later she gave birth to her first child and moved back to England.
Although family life occupied much of her time she continued to draw and paint even
if at a a much reduced rate of productivity.
But within a few years she was able to devote more time to her career, producing light humorous
illustration and strip cartoons for magazines including The Sketch and Punch, as well as
a number of humorous books.
And by this time she had refined what had been a rather anonymous technique into a more
fashionable playful modernist style using a tightly controlled fine line with either
washes of flat colour or spot colours applied at printing.
Among these was the particularly successful A Winter Sports Alphabet published in 1926.
The book was a collaboration with the Punch writer known as Evoe, and it comically dealt
with the current craze for ski-ing among the more fashionable affluent middle classes.
And it sold in large numbers to the very people it made fun of.
And although it was never a dominant thread of her career she also created some advertising
work in the 1930s, including a series of press ads for Liberty scarves.
In that decade Dennys authored and illustrated a trilogy of semi-autobiographical books starting
in 1930 with Mrs Dose the Doctor's Wife, and also found time to write several plays.
During the Second World War she illustrated some engagingly whimsical children's books
written by Rodney Bennett and she also wrote and illustrated her own series of comic articles
under the banner Henrietta's War for the Sketch magazine, which were also published as books.
During the 1950s she became less productive as an illustrator and by the 1960s she was
no longer working commercially.
But at the age of 70, she took up oil painting, and after a life of considerable creative
output Joyce Dennys died in 1991 at the age of 98
Rafael DeSoto was born into a noble and wealthy banking family in Puerto Rico in 1904.
But in 1915 when Rafael was only 11 the family suffered a huge financial disaster and not
long after his father died of a heart attack.
In his teens he left for San Juan, to be trained for the priesthood.
But luckily while there his artistic talent didn't go unnoticed and he was also encouraged
to pursue painting and drawing.
And it soon became obvious that his future would be as some sort of artist rather than
as a catholic priest.
So in 1923 at age of 19 he relocated to New York and even though he barely spoke English
he managed to get a job in an advertising agency, and he worked there for the next 6
years.
In 1930, by which time his English was fluent and his understanding of the illustration
market was strong he began to create illustrations, mostly for western-themed pulp fiction magazines.
Within a couple of years he had become well established in this market and had branched
out into other genres, and in particular he had great success with hardbitten detective
stories.
Like virtually all the pulp artists he worked in oil paint and had a confident expressive
technique and a good eye for lighting effects which made him ideal for the melodramatic
requirements of the average pulp cover.
His paintings were based on photographs he took of models in the poses he wanted, and
he would then place them strategically within the composition, and add the props and background
if any were needed. Frequently these were kept to a minimum with theatrical darkness
being an ever popular choice.
He worked prolifically throughout the 1930s and by the end of it was considered one of
the most talented and successful illustrators in the pulp fiction market.
DeSoto was a diabetic and unable to fight in the second world war, but his output diminished
nevertheless as during the war his wife was diagnosed with cancer and she died a couple
of years later in 1946.
In the 1950s the market for pulp fiction dwindled rapidly to non-existence, but he started creating
more respectable illustrations for mainstream magazines including Colliers and The Saturday
Evening Post.
There was also the new paperback fiction market and the content of many of these provided
perfect material for DeSoto's melodramatic style.
And in addition he found himself in great demand from the new breed of larger format
adventure magazines for men, which also gave him free rein to create even more salacious
and overblown scenarios than the pulps had.
In 1964 he retired from illustration but taught art at State University in New York for another
decade, and he died in Long Island at the age of 88 in 1992.
And that's the end of another so I hope to see you next time around.