Gaar Williams was one of America's masters of 20th century comic art, but he is now seriously
overlooked in the history of that popular art form.
He was born in 1880 in Richmond Indiana, and he went on to study art in Cincinnati and
Chicago before he began cartooning professionally for the Chicago Daily News in 1904.
He stayed with the newspaper until 1909 when he moved on to the Indianapolis News.
His comical scenes of small town America resonated with many readers and he drew on his own background
for homespun good-natured humour they could relate to.
Colour wasn't often on his agenda, but when it was, like virtually all his contemporaries
he simply enhanced the line work with bright washes of watercolour.
But his real strength was his energetic and descriptive pen work and the bulk of his output
would continue to be monochrome throughout his career.
The First World War provided Williams with ammunition for some uncharacteristically vitriolic
illustration, and in 1918 the book Keeping Up With William by Irving Bacheller was published,
featuring a host of brutally comic images by Williams satirising Kaiser Wilhelm's belligerence.
He also illustrated a more typical light-hearted sheet music cover for a comic song about an
army recruit.
After the war ended he illustrated Ring Lardner's book The Young Immigrunts, which was published
in 1920.
This comical story with deliberate mis-spellings throughout was ideal material for Williams'
talent.
With his deceptively loose linear approach he could create cartoon images which successfully
evoked the personalities and disposition of the cast of characters.
In the following year, Williams moved again to a new job with the Chicago Tribune, and
he stayed with them for the next 14 years.
During this time the Tribune reprinted many of his cartoons in around a dozen separate
albums, all of which proved popular with the public.
He also had success with his comic strip soap opera titled A Strain on the Family Tie.
This was frequently published in flat colour, which was applied at print to Williams' original
were black and white line work.
He did create some actual colour illustrations for the covers of farm life magazine and although
there was nothing particularly distinctive about them he made good enough use of his
watercolour washes.
By the beginning of the 1930s his cartoons were being syndicated in around 40 different
newspapers and he was reaping the financial rewards of his ongoing success.
But following a pattern we've seen in many other cases the grim reaper has his own agenda
and Williams suffered a fatal cerebral haemorrhage in 1935 at the age of only 54.
If I didn't know better I would have been convinced that Dugald Stewart Walker was a
British illustrator from the style of his work.
But he was born and raised in Richmond,Virginia in 1883 before relocating in his late teens
to study at the New York School of Art.
Bizarrely, when he started work it was as an insurance salesman, and only when it dawned
on him and his employers that he was fairly hopeless in this line of work did he attempt
a career in art.
And at first it was as an artist, rather than an illustrator that he enjoyed success, regularly
exhibiting his impressionistic watercolour paintings.
But in 1912 his illustration work appeared in the book Stories for Pictures, and this
provided him with a foothold in the world of publishing.
Two years later his copiously illustrated Fairy Tales from Hans Christian Andersen appeared
- and this time around his input and involvement in the illustration and even the writing of
the stories made the book a major popular success.
The formally constructed monochrome drawings showcased his highly decorative and descriptive
line work, which was on a par with the more widely recognised masters of this technique.
And when it came to colour he continued to use quite formal layouts featuring exquisitely
rendered detailed watercolours, which produced mesmerising fantasy visualisations of the
text.
They were far from representational but their complexity and aesthetic qualities defied
the reader to turn the page.
Some of his work was reproduced with added spot colour, and on occasion when creating
colour artwork, he also employed a more flat and formal approach possibly with gouache
which was strongly suggestive of the modernism which would later be called art deco.
And this could be clearly seen in his work for his own authored book Dreamboats and Other
Stories, published in 1918.
But most frequently he confined himself to the illustration of books written by others,
such as The Boy who knew what the birds said , which was written by Padraig Colum and which
was also published in 1918.
And in 1923 he illustrated Hal Garrott's strange fantasy Snythergen with yet another collection
of distinctive images in both colour and black and white.
1927 saw the publication of his edition of Jean Ingelow's story Mopsa the Fairy, and
in 1929 His own Sally's ABC, featuring some particularly
enchanting two colour line illustrations proved to be a popular success.
But that seems to have been his last published work and although I don't know the circumstances
Dugald Walker was another who left the party early in 1937 at the age of only 54.
Kurt Wiese was born in Minden in Germany in 1887, and despite his obvious talent his artistic
ambitions were firmly discouraged by his family.
So in 1909 at the age of 22 he took a job in imports and exports, selling merchandise
in China.
Five years later when the First World War broke out he was imprisoned by the British
in Australia, because of his nationality.
But making the best of his misfortune he spent the bulk of his time in captivity drawing
and developing his visual skills.
When the war was over he returned to Germany, but in the postwar economy making headway
was far from easy
four years later he sailed to Brazil, where he started to enjoy some success as an illustrator
of books such as this from 1924.
He knew that to achieve more he had to go where the commissions were bigger and better
and so he left for New York in 1927.
Felix Salten's book about a young deer titled Bambi and illustrated throughout by Wiese
was published in 1929 and it was a big commercial success, later to be adapted by Disney studios
as a feature length animation.
The illustrations were created directly onto lithographic stones, and this was a process
he would return to frequently throughout his career.
A year later he married and moved to farmland in New Jersey.
The book Young Fu of the Upper Yangtse, written by Elizabeth Foreman Lewis was published in
1932, and Wiese's earlier experiences in China made him the ideal illustrator to visually
evoke the story.
Ho Ming - Girl of New China appeared a couple of years later.
In 1933 he illustrated his first true picture book, another oriental story about Ping the
Duck, written by Marjorie Flack, and Weise's charming lithographic images contributed greatly
to the book's success.
In a 40 year period he illustrated over 300 books, including quite a few he also wrote
so the best I can do is highlight a handful of them.
The first two of Walter Brooks's Freddy the Pig stories had been illustrated by Adolfo
Maugard, but Wiese took over at the third and continued to be the illustrator of 24
more in the following 3 decades.
And for this remarkably enduring series Wiese created a vast number of s impressive energetic
pen and ink drawings.
In 1935 Honk the Moose, written by Phil Stong was published and soon enjoyed commercial
success, and Wiese would go on to create quite a few more books with Stong throughout his
career.
The Five Chinese Brothers, written by Claire Huchet Bishop appeared in 1938 and in the
wake of the recent purge of Dr. Suess's books it seems likely that Wiese's light comic caricatures
of Chinese people would be similarly unwelcome in contemporary publishing .
He continued to be astonishingly prolific in the decades that followed, and whether
the books he created were comic, serious or instructional all of them were visually entertaining
and enjoyed great success.
Among his later achievements was the his own picture book Fish in the Air in 1948 and in
1952 the equally appealing rabbit story happy Easter, both employing traditional lithograhy.
His final project was The Truffle Pig, written by Claire Huchet Bishop, published in 1971.
And Kurt Weise died in 1974 at the age of 87.
Despite what looks very much like a particularly French sounding name it seems it's pronounced
Oygen Croysant, and he was actually born in Landau, Germany in 1898.
He was the son of the painter August Croissant and predictably young Eugen showed a natural
talent for drawing and painting.
In 1918 he began studying architecture in Munich, but soon realised his mistake and
changed to applied arts, which was a far better fit for his abilities.
And even while studying he began to have his idiosyncratic comic illustrations published
in the Munich-based humour magazine Meggendorfer Blätter.
At first they were line only spot illustrations and even though the technique was not as extreme
as it would later become there was already no mistaking his work for anybody else's.
Before long he graduated to being featured in colour and the addition of watercolour
washes applied with equal apparent disregard for representation added considerably to the
distinctive nature and disjointed appeal of his illustrations.
In the early 1920s he also had success as an artist and regularly exhibited his landscapes,
and he would maintain both aspects of his creativity for the rest of his life.
Throughout the decade his highly distinctive humorous illustrations continued to appear
exclusively on the covers and in the pages of Meggendorfer Blätter.
I couldn't find an edition of the magazine which didn't feature at least one illustration
by him, so it's more than likely he was employed as a staff artist.
In 1927 Meggendorfer was absorbed by the more successful Fliegende Blätter, and along with
several of his contemporaries he continued to create precisely the same type of illustration
for the new management.
There was even more colour work for this magazine and arguably he was now at the very height
of his powers with the ability to make his deceptively wayward use of both line and colour
remarkably expressive and eloquent.
While the vast majority of his output was now concentrated in the pages of Fliegende
he did also have some work published but with nothing like the same frequency in Simplicissimus
too in the 1930s.
Despite Hitler's inexorable rise to power and his eventual political triumph in 1933
Croissant's work remained completely apolitical and his work made no reference to this monumental
change in German and ultimately world affairs.
Even when the war began in 1939 Croissant generally avoided the subject, remaining as
frivolous and surreal as he had always been.
He did later create covers which were less than complimentary about the allies, but it
seemed rather like lip service on his part, and he certainly left the more hysterical
antisemitic attacks to his colleagues.
Ironically, despite their aggressive nature these covers were among his most imaginative
and attractive illustrations
In 1944 Fliegende Blätter ceased publication completely and as with several of his colleagues
I've been unable to find any illustration at all by him after that year.
But he did continue to paint landscapes with success into old age and he died in 1976 at
the age of 78.
That's the end of this instalment and I look forward to our paths crossing again when the
next one is complete.