Trying to find biographical information about German artist and comic illustrator Emil Reinicke
is a particularly frustrating experience.
And if it wasn't for the Dutch comics site Lambiek.com I would have nothing at all.
But on a more positive note I have managed to excavate quite a lot of visual material
and he has to be included in the series simply because his work is such a source of personal
fascination.
Reinicke was born in 1859 in the town of Zerbst and he studied at the Art Academies in Dresden
and Munich between 1876-1882.
Following his 6 years of art training he began working as a painter and he had popular success
with biblical and mythological art along with quite a few paintings of a far more humorous
nature.
And although he continued to work as an artist he quickly became better known as a humorous
illustrator in the pages of the German satirical magazine Fliegende Blätter.
It may well be that he worked as a staff artist at the magazine but I have no proof other
than the immense amount of work he created for them.
Early on in his career all his illustration work was monochrome as the magazine would
only feature colour in later decades but even within that lim itation Reinicke was more
diverse than many of his contemporaries.
There are plenty of examples of line only cartoons and the precision and expressiveness
of his line work was nothing short of exceptional.
But there are just as many tonal examples too.
At this point they were all printed as halftone monochrome but even so his balance of line
and tone was just about perfect.
And in both the tonal and line work he varied the level of caricature in his subjects from
out and out comic through to almost representational.
Although it was his comical magazine work which made his reputation he also worked on
books such as Funny Tales From The Animal World, published in 1900, although that's
the only one I've found visual evidence of.
Even during the years of The Great War Reinicke created light domestic humour for the magazine
and he continued to produce similarly upbeat comic material in the years following Germany's
defeat and subsequent financial misery.
It wasn't until the mid 1920s that his illustrations began to appear in colour in the magazine,
which is a great pity because there are very few examples and the last dated piece of work
I've been able to find is from 1926.
At this point he would have been 67 years old so it's more than possible that he would
have subsequently retired.
But however he spent his later years Emil Reinicke died in 1934 at the age of 75, and
is now almost completely forgotten.
For some time it was believed that the illustrator Florence Harrison was a woman whose full name
was Emma Florence Harrison.
But this has been disproved by some thorough detective work by Mary Jacobs, who has created
a website dedicated to Harrison's life and work.
It seems she was actually Florence Susan Harrison and was born the daughter of a ships captain
in Darwin, Australia in 1877.
Nothing else is recorded about her until 1905 and it isn't known where if anywhere she studied
art.
But it was in that year when she was already 28 years old, that her book Rhymes and Reasons
was published.
The book proved to be very popular so a similar follow up titled the Rhyme of A Run was published
not long after and it proved to be just as successful.
With such powerful evidence that she had hit on a winning formula, Harrison published a
third collection entitled In the Fairy Ring the following year.
In 1908 she was commissioned to illustrate a lavishly bound and illustrated gift book
of the poems of Christina Rossetti.
This was a far cry from the frivolity of her own books but she more than rose to the occasion
with a series of suitably evocative and wistful images.
And this volume confirmed the idea that when it came to verse Florence Harrison had few
equals as an illustrator, and many others followed.
Guinevere and other poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson was published in 1912 and as with the Rossetti
book Harrison's images were again historically and romantically themed.
The same year saw the publication of Elfin Song, another illustrated volume of her own
poetry, and this rapidly became her most successful and popular work to date.
Harrison's line work was created with pen, brush and ink, applied with precision and
formal calligraphic expressiveness.
and in that regard there were obvious echoes of the arts and crafts pioneer Walter Crane,
and traditional woodblock engraving.
And in colour she used the line as the foundation and applied washes of usually tonal watercolour,
but it was the line which remained the most descriptive element in her images.
Her edition of The Early poems of William Morris was published in 1914 and the mix of
colour and line illustrations clearly demonstrated the extent of her formidable creative and
technical ability.
During the years of the Great War for some unknown reason she spent some time in Belgium.
But given the battering Belgium received at the hands of their German invaders it wasn't
somewhere you would casually decide to live.
In 1918, the year the war ended, she illustrated two more books - The House of Bricks by Agnes
Grozier Herbertson and Godmother's Garden" by Netta Syrett .
In the early 1920s she was living and working in London and throughout the decade she continued
to illustrate books of prose and verse with persistent success.
By the 1930s her illustration style and preferred subjects were beginning to look decidedly
old fashioned, but nevertheless she continued to be published if not as prolifically as
in her heyday.
In 1939 after a career of 35 years Florence Harrison retired from commercial illustration
and moved to Brighton to live with her cousin.
And it was there that she died in 1955 at the age of 78.
If you conduct an online image search for American illustrator Andrew Loomis most of
what you'll find are images from the many instructional art books he published, rather
than his own output.
Which is a pity as it was his immense talent, versatility and technical skill that gave
his books their authority and made them so enduringly popular.
Loomis was born in New York in 1892 but grew up in Ohio.
At the age of 19 he studied at the Art Students League of New York before relocating to Chicago
to work in a commercial art studio.
He served with the American army in World War I, and on his return to civilian life
he worked for a few years in a couple of advertising agencies before opening his own studio in
downtown Chicago.
And throughout the 1920s and 30s Loomis sustained a successful and highly lucrative career in
commercial illustration.
He was regularly commissioned by some of the more prominent magazine titles, and he was
equally in demand for advertising work.
This was hardly surprising as not only did all his work boast high levels of finish but
as with so many other representational illustrators in USA at the time the all-American wholesome
nature of his favoured subjects made him a natural choice for many clients.
Loomis had immense technical skill and control of whatever medium he was using.
Outside his instructional books loomis only infrequently created monochrome work, and
for this he used ink and charcoal.
In colour he generally favoured oil paint, although some images were created in watercolour
and gouache. And he was equally at home with the use of pastels.
But whatever medium he used he roamed freely around the possibilities of its application
with techniques which were sometimes deliberately loose and impressionistic, and at other times
displayed the kind of brushstroke-free qualities you might expect from a Renaissance B aroque
painter.
Given the level of his success as an illustrator I don't know how he found time but he also
had a spell in the 1930s teaching at the American Academy of Art.
And that experience led him to put together his first instructional book, which was Fun
With a Pencil in 1939.
This book was an invaluable guide for aspiring cartoonists. And the strange thing about it
was it seems to have been the only time he ever produced any cartoon illustration. I
can't find a single commercial example.
But it was immensely successful and he produced several more books on various aspects of drawing
and painting in the coming decades.
Alongside the creation of these manuals he continued to be successful in his own illustration
career and he remained a popular choice in magazines and advertising up to his death
in 1959 at the age of only 67.
Arnrid Johnston was born in Uddevalla, Sweden to a Swedish father and English mother in
1895.
She had an obvious talent for visual expression even in childhood, and in 1914 when she was
19 years old she relocated to England to study at the prestigious Slade School of Art in
London.
The small amount of biography I found states that from there she went onto work as a painter
and sculptor but the only evidence I've managed to track down is this carved marble obelisk.
But whatever the reason it wasn' t until 1930 that she started to create illustrations for
London Transport posters.
The images she created incorporated elements from the highly popular art deco movement
but they were far from slavish and consequently her posters and other publicity work were
particularly distinctive and playful in both content and execution.
In 1938 Johnston wrote and illustrated Pigwiggen, the story of flying pig, and this charming
fantasy story and collection of frivolous illustrations set her on a path as a very
popular and highly respected children's illustrator.
The book Animal Families followed in 1939, and this was the first of what would be a
long line of heavily illustrated textbooks exploring aspects of wildlife from around
the world.
And for both these books and all that followed she used a more overtly drawn roughly textured
technique, a considerable distance from her earlier flatter graphic poster work.
I can find no definitive information about how these images were created. It's possible
they were drawn in ink and coloured with washes, and additional shading and texture added with
crayon or pencil.
But it's equally likely that they were in fact produced by traditional stone lithography,
and this theory is supported by the impossibility of tracking down any original drawings by
her for sale.
But whichever of these methods she used it continued to be her definitive style for the
rest of her career.
She produced many more wildlife educational books but every once in a while would take
on more overtly entertaing material, such as her return to anthropomorphic animal characters
with her very successful 1944 book Fables From Aesop.
1944 also saw the publication of Timbu the monkey written by Joseph Avrach.
And in 1946 there was Drowsy and Timmy Go South by Elf Lewis Clarke.
And with the notable exception of 1952's The Market, which featured a series of attractive
duotone illustrations of human activity pretty much all her work continued to be about animals.
Unfortunately in later years Arnrid Johnston's eyesight deteriorated and eventually got to
the point ehere she could no longer work in either art or illustration and she died in
1972 at the age of 77.
And that rather sad ending brings another instalment to a close and I hope I'll see
you next time around