What few sources I could locate about German fantasy illustrator Franz Stassen were wildly
contradictory about dates of publication, so in terms if his career I've generally had
to give up on the usual chronological approach.
He was born in 1869 in Hanau and from 1886 onward he spent a total of 6 years at the
Berlin College of Fine Arts .
One source asserts it was 1899 when he illustrated the 12th century love story of Tristan and
Isolde.
I have serious doubts that this is accurate but I've got to start somewhere.
Whatever year it was actually published this collection of 12 illustrations blended two
major stylistic influences.
There was the sinuous organic appeal of Art Nouveau, known as Jugendstil in Germany.
And there was also the more formal influence of early 19th century engravings evident.
In 1908 Stassen became a member of the circle of like-minded individuals gathered around
composer Richard Wagner's son Siegfried. He and his friends were dedicated to the preservation
and performance of his father's dramatic operatic works.
Stassen was rightly considered the perfect choice to illustrate the Nordic mythology
that was at the thematic heart of all Wagner's music.
And in the years that followed he created numerous portfolios illustrating many of Wagner's
emotionally charged operas.
It's asserted that these images were created as hand tinted lithographs, and I see no reason
to dispute that.
Time consuming as that process would have been these books were never intended for mass
consumption, but were limited edition collectors items for Wagner's devoted admirers, and they
would have fetched high prices.
So from 1908 up to 1920 or so Stassen devoted himself to the visualisation of the narratives
which were the dramatic mythological basis of the musical compositions.
There are three different years cited for the publication of the brothers Grimm tale
of the Seven Ravens, but whenever they were created this was another significant series
of narrative illustrations, this time apparently created as pen and ink with watercolour and
printed by full colour mechanical lithography.
Consequently these images have a much more modern almost comic book appeal.
It seems relatively certain that Hans von Wolzogen's mythological tale Die Edda was
published in 1920 . It featured around 50 linear illustrations created with carefully
controlled pen and ink.
Once again I can't find reliable dates but throughout his career he also created a large
amount of illustration for Johann Goethe's epic tale of Faust.
Quite a lot of these images were created with watercolour but unlike the Seven Ravens work
they were not colourised monochrome drawings but fully rendered paintings.
There were also even more black and white pen drawings produced and the work was published
spasmodically in instalments.
Naturally enough Adolf Hitler was a great admirer of Stassen's work, and in the 1930s
he commissioned four huge tapestries in which Stassen revisited the story of Die Edda to
be hung on the walls of the Reich Chancellory .
Sadly they were destroyed in the last days of the war, along with many of his paintings
when the allies bombarded Berlin.
After the war Stassen attempted without much success to re-create the public art of his
which had been destroyed. He also resumed work on his Faust epic and he was still creating
illustrations for it when he died in 1949 in Berlin at the age of 80.
John R. Neill was born in Philadelphia in 1877 and in his late teens he enrolled into
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
But he quit after only one semester, and after a couple of years of unchallenging work for
a local department store in 1898 he was hired as a staff artist at the Philadelphia North
American newspaper.
The comic strips and illustrated features he created there were at least a beginning
but they barely hinted at the illustrator he would become.
By 1904 he was also illustrating books for children, and most significantly in that year
he was approached by L. Frank Baum's publishers to illustrate The Marvellous Land of Oz, a
follow up to Baum's stupendously successful Wizard of Oz.
Baum and Oz's original illustrator William Denslow had parted after a bitter dispute
over copyright and royalties and he needed a more amenable replacement.
Neill's first evocations of the characters stuck fairly closely to the originals, but
the new book also featured many entirely new characters he could put his own stamp on.
And although not as sensitively rendered as the illustrations would later become, even
at this stage his style was less graphically blockish than Denslow's.
Despite the immense success of the book Neill carried on working for the North American.
But he continued to be offered the opportunity to illustrate the many variants on the Oz
theme that Baum was churning out, and all of them sold very well.
As the series continued the look of the books became progressively more sensitive, and revealed
the innate delicacy and expressiveness of Neill's technique in colour and black and
white. By this point he was also creating illustration
for other books for children and adults and working for magazines too.
In 1910 he illustrated an edition of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven.
Poe's verse was fantasy of an altogether more adult kind but Neill's melancholic duotone
illustrations proved to be a good match for Poe's writing.
In 1911 he finally gave up his job at the North American, and two years later he moved
to New York to be closer to his publishing clients.
Although he was essentially a linear illustrator his use of colour was far from an afterthought.
And like many of his contemporaries in Europe and America he applied washes of watercolour
on top of the line, rather than create fully fledged paintings.
L. Frank Baum died in 1919 but the Oz franchise rolled on successfully and was now written
by Ruth Plumly Thomson.
And naturally they continued to be illustrated by Neill, whose work had by now become the
definitive images for the series. And he stayed in that role for another couple of decades.
Eventually he became both writer and illustrator with a trio of Oz adventures all published
between 1940 to 1942,
But he had been having heart problems since the later 1930s and they proved to be fatal
in 1943 when he was only 65 years old.
If you want to see more of Neill's work there are around 30 complete books illustrated by
him which can be downloaded free at project Gutenberg.
Although he was born in Lisbon in 1888 Emmerico Nunes was actually half Portuguese and half
German, and he was published in both countries during his career.
In 1906 at the age of 18 he left Lisbon for Paris.
Whether he studied there or just had a good time isn't recorded, but he stayed there until
1911 before moving on to Munich.
There he quickly became a regular contributor to the German satirical magazine Meggendorfer
Blätter and his association with this widely read magazine did his career a lot of good.
When war was declared in 1914 Nunes left for Zurich in Switzerland, a country which remained
neutral throughout the conflict.
But from Zurich he continued to contribute to Meggendorfer and turned his talents to
propagandist work in support of Germany, and attacking the allies and their leaders.
He returned to Portugal when the war was over, and from there he not only carried on his
association with Meggendorfer but he also began contributing to the magazine's rival
Fliegende Blätter.
Although Nunes was considered primarily to be a cartoonist he frequently created images
in other more serious styles, from languid art deco figures to more directly representational
romanticised approaches.
He also seems to have been eclectic in his use of media.
As you would expect, his line work was created with pen and ink, and although once again
he happily moved back and forth between the comic and the serious it was always highly
controlled and visually absorbing.
It was a similar story with his use of colour. Some of the time he applied gouache flat with
well chosen colour palettes, but was also adept with varying levels of tonal application
of both watercolour and gouache.
And as was the common practice of the day quite often his work was created as line and
then coloured with flat printed overlays.
From every conceivable angle Nunes was one of the most stylistically diverse illustrators
of his generation.
In the 1920s and 30s his illustration career was flourishing, and by this point he was
also being regularly commissioned by several Portuguese and Spanish magazines.
The demise of Meggendorfer Blätter in 1927 did leave somewhat of a hole in his regular
client base, but he continued working for his other European magazine clients, and he
also ventured into children's book illustration where he demonstrated an obvious talent for
narrative work with some particularly engaging and amusing line and flat colour illustrations.
As if that wasn't enough there was also occasional work for advertising, although it was magazine
illustration which continued to dominate his output.
By now he was one of the most successful and widely published illustrators in Europe
But in his later life he seems to have lost interest in commercial illustration and he
became increasingly involved in promoting the art of Portugal, travelling across Europe
and America as a roving ambassador.
And he continued to paint with some success up to his death in Portugal in1968 at the
age of 80.
I'm glad to say that in Portugal at least Nunes is still recognised and admired as one
of the most influential modernist Portuguese illustrators.
Hungarian illustrator Tibor Gergely was born in Budapest in 1900, and other than that
there's only very sketchy biographical information.
He studied lithography in Vienna and also worked for a Viennese puppet theatre as a
set and model designer before returning to Budapest
in 1931 to teach art and design.
But it wasn't until 1939 when he was already 40 years old that he and his wife emigrated
to New York, and he started to work as a commercial illustrator.
in 1940 he illustrated his first children's book the Talking Typewriter, which had been
written by Margaret pratt and the success of the book led him to work on many others
for the rest of his career.
In the same year he collaborated with the writer Georges Duplaix and together they created
the book The Topsy Turvy Circus, which was another popular success.
He also had created a handful of covers for The New Yorker, which also helped to boost
his public profile.
But as luck would have it a couple of years later Georges Duplaix became a partner in
the publishing company Little Golden Books. And through his association with Duplaix Gergely
immediately became a permanent contributor to many of the books published by the company
in the coming decades.
The first was Tootle the Train in 1945 and he followed this up a year later with Scuffy
the Tugboat.
Gergely's playful blend of folk art and modernism fit in particularly well with the fashion
of the times and Golden Books soon came to dominate the childrens' book market in America
throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
The images were painted, but with deliberate naivety, and careful observation collided
with abstraction and skewed perspectives to give all his work an undeniable and appealing
energy.
There weren't that many times Gergely created monochrome illustration but when he did he
used an ink line with roughly shaded crayon.
And when it came to colour he painted in gouache, using a combination of flat and rough tonal
application. And on occasion it looks very much like he was shading with pencil or crayon
on the colour work too.
In his career Gergely created far too many books to show them all but many of them such
as The Happy Man and His Dump Truck continued to feature motorised vehicles of one sort
or another.
Watch Me Said the Jeep was published in1945 and another of his greatest successes The
Fire Engine Book appeared in 1950
And for the next 2 decades All his illustration continued to display the same upbeat visual
appeal and a natural talent for composition and narrative sequencing.
In 1974, after an astonishingly prolific 35 year career Tiber Gergely retired, and and
he died in New York four years later at the age of 78.
And that's another four of my bucket list and I hope to see you next time.