British marine artist and illustrator Charles Pears was born in the town of Pontefract in
Yorkshire in 1873, and later studied at the nearby East Hardwick and Pomfret College.
He set out on a career as a painter in the early 1890s when he was not yet 20 years old,
and it was with his oil paintings of seascapes
and generally maritime themes he had the most significant success.
He moved to London in the early years of the 20th century and among other examples
of commissions for children's books in 1907 he created colour illustrations for an edition of
Alice in Wonderland, which showed an altogether different aspect of his visual abilities,
with dextrous use of pen and watercolour washes in the tradition of Arthur Rackham.
In 1910 he published the book From the Thames to the Seine, with a series of evocative scenic
watercolours and equally impressive line drawings recording his travels in England and France.
and 3 years later in 1913 he designed his first poster,
an atmospheric oil painting of New York at night for the Cunard shipping line.
In 1914 Pears undertook his first commission for London Transport, An Alphabet of Train,Omnibus
and Tram, which lightheartedly promoted travel on the various methods offered by the company
which again demonstrated his facility for gestural line work. And by this
point his illustration was increasingly competing with his paintings for his time.
But war with Germany began in that year and he not only served with the
Royal Marines but also found time to work as a war artist.
Pears was fortunate enough to survive without injury and in
1918 returned to civilian life to resume his parallel careers.
In the years immediately after the war he was primarily occupied with painting seascapes again
and it wasn't until the mid 1920s that more examples of his posters began to proliferate.
At this time his professional association with London transport blossomed,
and he also began producing a large volume of similar posters
promoting British holiday locations for several of the country's rail lines.
In the 1930s there were also commissions from the Empire Marketing board for
whom he produced several posters depicting aspects of life in Britain and its colonies.
Not all his travel posters were scenic in nature and in the 1930s he also began painting altogether
more figure based imagery, featuring crowds of happy holiday makers. And he showed a keen eye
for the use of attractive but far from salacious young female characters to draw the viewer in.
The majority of his posters were painted naturalistically, which in the 20s and 30s
was actually quite unusual in this arena as most had by now opted for flat coloured
areas through the posterisation process. Even so every once in a while it seems
he also wandered into that territory, although not to any significant degree.
Among the many locations he illustrated the coastal resort of Southend,
only some 50 miles from London and so highly popular with its inhabitants,
seems to have been the one he returned to more than any other. And this series alone
was a telling example of the versatility of his creative and technical abilities.
Despite the popularity of his posters he continued to enjoy success with as an artist
and as well as his dramatic seascape paintings he also had success with his limited edition prints.
During the second world war he worked again as a war artist and produced
some stirring paintings of the war at sea. And when it was over in 1945 he
carried on exclusively as a painter up to his death in 1958 at the age of 85.
Henry Mirande was born in Nice on the French Riviera in 1877. I can find no
record of a formal art education or anything else
about his early life until he moved to Paris around the turn of the century.
Mirande lived and worked in the artists' colony in Montmartre and initially worked
as both an artist and an illustrator. And although he was a talented expressionist
painter he was somewhat perversely reluctant to exhibit his work.
But he had no such problems with his illustrations being published and by the
turn of the century his humorous images were appearing regularly in Le Sourire.
Soon enough he was also working regularly for others including Le Rire and Fantasio,
and there were no less than seven editions of L’Assiette au Beurre devoted entirely to his work.
In 1906 he created some sheet music covers but in the first
two decades of the century it was humorous magazine work which forged his reputation.
Among his favoured topics was the artist in his studio, and some form of humorous narrative
involving life models in various states of undress. And in many ways they neatly
defined his broadly goodnatured light humour and winning pen and wash style.
So throughout the first decade f the century and into the second he continued to produce
more humorous illustration, some of which involved the production of complex and highly
absorbing crowd scenes, depicting various aspect of french life, and frequently with a generous
helping of comic sexual activity. His work almost invariably appeared in full colour
and combined his light gestural inking with agreeable tonal colour washes.
When war with Germany began in 1914 he appeared most frequently in Le Rire Rouge,
but even during the worst of this appalling conflict he continued to produce typically
light humour to boost the morale of both the troops and civilians.
But for reasons I can't imagine following the end of the war he increasingly moved away from
comedy and his work became much darker in tone, mora akin to his earlier expressionist paintings.
He was regularly creating sombre and frequently disturbing monochrome lithographs and
etchings for novels such as 1925's The Kiss of the Leper by François Mauriac,
and he continued with this type of work for other equally bleak
fiction by contemporoary writers Pierre Mac Orlan and Francis Carco.
Following these book illustrations the trail of evidence disappears so i have no idea how
he spent his later life, but Henri Mirande died in 1955 in Paris at the age of 78.
Alice Bolam Preston was born in 1888 and lived in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. In her later
teens she attended the Massachusetts School but as with the others featured in this instalment
I can tell you very little if anything more about her life and circumstances.
The earliest examples of her work I could find were for the book Sniffy Snappy and Velvet
Paw by Ruth O. Dyer, published in 1918. Most of the illustrations for this book were created as
quite delicate monochrome line and wash but there were also a couple of pleasing full colour pages.
A year later she published Mollie Waddy and Tony, a story about circus elephants
written by Paul Waitt, using simpler ink outlines and the application of flat colour.
And in 1920 Preston created a large number of particularly pleasing line
only pen and ink drawings for the book Seven Peas in the Pod by Margery Bailey,
In the same year The Green Forest Fairy Book by Loretta Ellen Brady was also published and
this time around Preston's illustrations were printed as duotone using in a rather garish
orange which only served to detract from the innate descriptive quality of her line work.
The Little Man with One Shoe, another by Margery Bailey was published in 1921 and
this was generously illustrated with a large number of typically well executed calligraphic
pen and ink drawings from Preston, which were mercifully free of studio added colours.
And In the same year she provided a grand total of 2 illustrations,
one colour, one monochrome for Peggy in her Blue Frock by Eliza Orne White.
1924's The Valley of Color Days, written by Helen B. Sandwell featured some particularly delightful
watercolour pages which were successful in demonstrating what her work could be with
the addition of colour by the artist herself. And they combined traditional techniques with
more modernist simplicity of application with great success. Why more of her book
work was not published in full colour I don't know but it seems a great pity that it wasn't.
There were also many of the more expected monochrome line drawings in the book,
most of which were used as chapter headings throughout, and all of them clearly showed
her linear abilities and flair for the creation of woodland fantasy and fairy tale characters.
In the later 1920 s there is evidence of work created for magazines, including some highly
attractive covers for House Beautiful, and one example from an undated copy of Vogue
but unfortunately that's where the trail of her work goes cold. And once more I'm sorry
to say all I can add is that Alice Bolam Preston died in 1958 at the age of 70.
Stephen Gooden was born in London in 1892, the son of an art dealer.
He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1909 to 1913,
and following his graduation he served in the Royal Engineers during World War I.
At the end of the war he set about making a reputation for himself as a master of the use
of copper engraving and it took a few years but in 1923 he illustrated the particularly
obscure ancient Greek book the Anacreon Only a year later he embarked on a monumental
edition of the Bible for the Nonesuch Press, to be published as a limited
edition in several volumes up to 1927. And the combination of decorative motifs and
chapter headings cemented his early reputation as Britains most accomplished copper engraver.
in 1929 he created dramatic illustrations for The Brook Kerith, a Syrian story written by
George Moore which had first been published in 1916. Gooden's version was a limited
edition of just 500 copies but served as a showcase which soon led to others.
In 1931 Gooden illustrated the Fables de la Fontaine,
and for this book he produced a series of absorbing scenic engravings. Despite the
book's undoubted graphic qualities it failed to make much of an impression and sold quite poorly.
Creating his work with this technique, combined with a steadfast refusal to work in colour,
and accept more mainstream commissions was always going to keep Gooden out of the popular limelight
and in 1933 he returned to the writing of George Moore for the equally obscure Perronik the Fool.
In 1936 he produced what is arguably his greatest and certainly most popular published work when
he returned to the illustration of fables and the moralist stories of the Greek slave Aesop.
And unlike the uniform presentation of his illustrations for la Fontaine,
for this publication he created a wide variety of illustrations from simple
freestanding close ups through to more complex scenic work. And he made great use
of decorative graphic devices of various kinds in many of the images he produced.
1939 was the year that world war 2 began and in that year Gooden produced apocalyptic engravings
under the banner the Rider on the Pale Horse in response to the advent of another global conflict.
But he didn't involve himself in propaganda, and stuck with the illustration of classics.
in 1940 he illustrated Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
with a series of formally composed quite lightly engraved scenes taken from the text,
And in 1945 the year the war ended he illustrated The Poet's Cat,
a collection of verse written by his sister. But despite his relatively low public profile,
throughout his career he was in great demand among wealthy organisations and individuals for
the creation of engraved ex libris bookplates for their valuable collections and libraries.
He also designed banknotes for the Bank of England during his career, the only time
his work appeared in colour and in 1955 Stephen Gooden died at the relatively young age of 63.
And although nothing like a household name even in
his lifetime following his death he seems to have been almost completely forgotten.
I hope you found something in this collection to your liking and more
of a similar persuasion will be forthcoming next time around.