American children's illustrator Janet Laura Scott was born in 1888 in Wisconsin.
In her later teens she attended the Art Institute of Chicago and soon after she travelled to
Germany, where she spent another year of study at the Munich Academy.
She returned to the USA in 1914 as war broke out in Europe and on her return she found
work creating watercolours for a company producing illustrated homespun verses and mottos for
framing.
In 1917 her colour illustrations for John. D. Bowman's book Happy All Day Through were
published and enjoyed popular success. These decorative modernist images were created using
both watercolour and gouache generally applied quite flat with minimal use of line work,
and owed a stylistic debt to oriental woodblock printing.
In the following year Elizabeth Gordon's Wild Flower Children was published, and it too
sold well as much for Scott's delightful watercolours as for the written content.
She used unusual combinations of colour, which were only occasionally naturalistic, and she
made frequent use of large dark background areas to provide tonal contrast.
She quickly developed a reputation for her child-friendly style and was soon in great
demand for illustrated greeting cards, calendars, and baby books.
In 1922 the book Princess of Cozytown by Ruth Plumley Thompson featured Scott's illustrations,
and although in this and most of her other books she was portraying fairy tale fantasy
worlds to stimulate the child's imagination her style continued to be resolutely modernist
and flat.
Little Bim The Circus Boy was published in 1924 and featured a series of similarly charming
stylised colour illustrations.
Among many of her successful publications were 1930's Round the World We Sail and two
years later The Ladder of Rickety Rungs written by T. C. O'Donnell.
And alongside her prolific bookwork she was also frequently commissioned to create covers
for several magazines, among them the respected Child life magazine.
In 1939 she published One Happy Day, yet another fantasy offering in her expected flat style.
But that appears to be the last of its kind and following the end of World War 2 her style
underwent a pronounced change of direction.
The early flat modernist approach she had gained her reputation with was replaced by
a far more conventional tonal watercolour render. The postwar years in the USA were
dominated by Little Golden Books and it looks very much like she felt she had to adapt to
survive. Consequently her later work seems comparatively lacking in terms of a distinctive
individual personality.
Not long after she stopped illustrating altogether to concentrate on a career as a watercolour
painter, with which she enjoyed success.
And Janet Laura Scott died in Maine in 1968 at the age of 80.
Irish woodcut artist and illustrator Robert Gibbings was born in Cork in 1889, and at
18 he began studying medicine at Cork University.
It took him 3 years to realise his mistake at which point he left to study at both the
Slade and Central School of Art in London.
But his art education was interrupted by the First World War in 1914, in which he was wounded
and sent home .
In 1919 he married and in the same year the Studio magazine published some of his woodcut
work which was critically well received.
And in 1922 he produced a poster for the London Underground and a publicity booklet for London
Zoo, and this was effectively his entrance into commercial illustration.
In the following year he illustrated the book Erewhon by Samuel Butler, with a series of
particularly brutalist graphic woodcuts, as well as a commission to create a set of illustrations
for the book The Lives of Gallant Ladies by Pierre de Bourdeille.
This work had been for The Golden Cockerel Press and not much later when the owners put
the business up for sale Gibbings borrowed £850 from a wealthy friend to buy the company.
He quickly made a success of it and he and his family became financially comfortable
within only a couple of years.
The books published were all limited editions, usually of around only 500 copies, but they
sold at far higher prices than mainstream published books.
And in addition to his own illustration the press commissioned other illustrators, all
of whom worked in the same medium.
Among those illustrated by Gibbings himself were The True History of Lucian in1927 and
Lamia Isabella by John Keats the following year.
He was also working simultaneously for other publishers, and illustrated The Charm of Birds
by Viscount Grey and A Mirror for Witches by Esther Forbes around the same time.
In 1928 he was offered a commission to illustrate a book set in Tahiti written by James Norman
Hall, and a year later Gibbings set out for the island to make drawings for the project.
The book was never actually completed, but he subsequently produced two of his own books
using the images he had created.
In 1932 Gibbings also created a series of 14 engravings for the Orient Line company,
one of which was also used as a poster.
But his business had relied heavily on wealthy American collectors, and following the Wall
street crash Gibbings' company collapsed.
But he continued to work as an illustrator from his home and In 1934 he completed the
two books that he considered to be his best, Beasts and Saints by Helen Waddell and Glory
of Life by Llewelyn Powys.
Following these successes he wrote and illustrated more of his own, including 1935's A True Tale
of Love in Tonga, followed a year later by Coconut Island, a book for children.
Gibbings had been having an affair with a woman 20 years his junior, and when she became
pregnant he left his family to live with her in Cornwall and subsequently married for the
second time in 1937.
he was commissioned by Penguin Books to write a travel book and following trips to Bermuda
and the Red Sea, he wrote and illustrated Blue Angels and Whales in 1938.
In 1939 he built a boat, which he sailed down the Thames and wrote an illustrated the book,
Sweet Thames Run Softly in 1940.
On the back of this success he created several more of a similar nature about his own travels
near and far.
His final book was Till I end my Song in 1957 and he died of cancer the following year at
the age of 69.
Danish illustrator Arne Ungermann was born the son of a police commissioner in Odense
in 1902. And other than that there really isn't much information to be had about him.
So I can only pick up the threads of his life in 1922 when he trained as a lithographer
and two years later he got a job in the advertising department of the Danish newspaper and magazine
Politiken. By 1930 he was working on a regular basis
as a cartoonist for the magazine and in 1935 he created the comic character Hanne Hansen,
which centred on an optimistic young woman who worked as a housemaid for a wealthy family,
and which had a very long run up to 1958. And alongside his magazine work Ungermann
began creating posters in an altogether more graphic style, and in 1939 produced a series
of particularly distinctive illustrations for the fairy tales of Hans Andersen.
In 1942 he created a series of charming modernist colour illustrations for the children's book
written by Jens Sigsgaard, Palle Alone in the World . The images he created became inextricably
linked to the story and led to further successful collaborations between the two, including
1945's Avel Spendabel. But he obviously resited being typecast and
continued to be remarkably diverse, not just in the nature of the projects he worked on,
but also in terms of his stylistic approaches. As well as his ongoing highly successful children's
book work there were more poster designs, all of which were graphically bold and visually
dynamic, with easy to understand visual messages for a wide range of clients.
Additionally he turned his hand to the design of ex libris bookplates and all manner of
books for adults. And in 1950 he collaborated with writer Jørgen
Nash on a loosely translated interpretation of Edward lear's nonsense story The Four Little
Children who Went Around the World. And this book in particular was in stylistic terms
a radically forward looking departure from the expected which proved popular with children
and their parents. And for the rest of his career Ungermann continued
to defy classification, and the visual evidence makes it abundantly clear that both his imagination
and diverse graphic talents carried him into his later years with enduring popularity.
Towards the end of his life he was also well known as the creator of many natrrative images
which were used within the TV programme Matador, which he worked on between 1978 and 1981.
And following a long, highly creative and diverse career Arne Ungermann died in 1981
when he was 79 years old.
William Neave Parker was born in 1910 somewhere in England and the life of this illustrator
is unfortunately pretty much a blank canvas.
One of the very few sources I found maintains that because his father wouldn't pay for him
to attend art school he worked in a bank and was completely self taught.
Because of the almost total absence of information I can't with any accuracy tell you when he
began a career as an illustrator but in 1937 he published A Picture Book of Linocuts, containing
twenty depictions of animals. And it seems from the visual evidence that at this time
lino cut and wood engraving were his favoured techniques, although whether they were for
books or sold as art prints I've been unable to determine.
It is recorded that Neave Parker served in the RAF during the second world war and it
seems likely, but by no means certain, that it was when the war ended in 1945 that he
began working for the Natural History Museum in London.
There he was engaged mainly on the reconstruction of dinosaurs. And naturally enough for this
work he turned to the additional subtlety and nuance offered by line and wash.
Unfortunately the vast majority of these illustrations appear to have been monochrome, but his skill
with the medium gave his dinosaurs great physical presence and definition.
And it is this later work which ultimately defines him in stylistic terms.
But In 1948 Parker had the chance to demonstrate just how successful his technique was in full
colour when he published the book The Tall Green House.
It was illustrated with a series of highly accomplished atmospheric colour vignettes
of British wildlife and rural scenery. This remarkably engrossing series was created with
either watercolour or diluted gouache and is undoubtedly among his best and certainly
most evocative work. Every page was imaginatively laid out, bringing type and image together
with great aesthetic balance
And during the 1950s he also created a series of tonal monochrome double page spreads on
various natural history themes for the Illustrated London News presumably to accompany informative
articles. And there are a couple of tantalising examples of illustrations for the Uncle Remus
Brer Rabbit stories dated from 1956.
There is little other evidence of his work to be found, and although some of it is manifestly
book work I can't find a dated record of any of it unfortunately.
Why so little is known or recorded about such a talented illustrator, and especially one
born relatively recently in terms of the scope of this series is puzzling and frustrating.
All I can add is that William Neave Parker died in 1961 when he would have been only
51 years old..
And that concludes what I hope has been another diverse instalment, and I look forward to
us meeting again for the next.