British illustrator Sidney Sime was born into a very poor family in Manchester in 1865,
and in his youth he worked in various jobs, including 5 years as a mine worker,
before going on to study at Liverpool School of Art.
He quickly realised that the best chance he had for making a living was through illustration,
rather than taking his chances as an artist. And at the outset of his career he contributed
regularly to many popular magazines of the day including the Illustrated London News,
Pall Mall Magazine, The Graphic, and Tatler.
In 1897 Sime's bizarre series of drawings titled From an Ultimate
Dim Thule began to appear in the magazine The Idler. The name of this series was
taken from a poem by Edgar Allen Poe. And it was these memorably peculiar
monochromes that earned Sime his reputation as a master of weird and wonderful images.
Between 1897 and 1899 he worked as as an editor at the Idler and another magazine
Eureka but neither suited him and he returned to life as a freelancer.
In 1904, he was approached by the author Lord Dunsany to illustrate his first book,
The Gods of Pegana, which was published a year later,
and this collaboration began a productive professional association which lasted until 1922.
Sime's approach to his choice and application of media was wide
ranging and produced unexpected and highly distinctive results.
It included watercolour washes, charcoal, and lamp black paint,
applied with any combination of brushes, pens, knives and sponges.
He was of the generation for whom full colour print would arrive late, But even when colour
became more widely available at the turn of the century he didn't show any interest in it. Some
of his images have subsequently been colourised, but certainly after his death by someone unknown.
Simes' work had come to the attention of the American publishing magnate William
Randolph Hearst, and unlikely as it seems he was invited to the United
States to discuss the idea of creating illustrations for Hearst's organisation.
But nothing came from the talks and he returned to England to carry on
working on another Dunsany book Time and the Gods, published in 1906.
Around this time Sime's interest in working as an artist in both oil
and watercolour painting increased dramatically, and he began creating
personal visions of the apocalypse as predicted in the Book of Revelations.
This was very much to the detriment of his illustration,
the volume of which reduced correspondingly.
Unfortunately for Sime his newfound desire to be recognised and achieve
greater success as an artist met with an almost complete lack of interest.
He continued ti have occasional illustration work published,
including more for Lord Dunsany, and in 1923 an optimistic return to endearingly
strange beasts in the book of songs titled Bogey Beasts with music by Josef Holbrooke.
But he stubbornly refused to create more commercially accessible material
and soon enough he found himself in his mid 60s with very little income.
Sime subsequently became something of a recluse, and having given up on both
illustration and art he died in 1941 in poverty, and almost immediately acquired
the status of obscure cult figure, which seems to have remained the case ever since.
Ferdinand von Řezníček was born in 1868 in Vienna to a noble Austrian family of Czech descent.
His father was a military officer,
and in his teens Ferdinand followed in his fathers footsteps and joined the cavalry.
But in 1888 when his father died he immediately enrolled at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.
Following his studies in 1892 Řezníček began worked for a firm of industrial
designers but by 1896 his lithographic illustrations were starting to appear
in the pages and on the cover of the arts magazine Jugend.
And within a year he had added both Simplicissimus and Fliegende Blätter to his client base.
His choice of subjects could best be described as lighthearted and
romantic and He was particularly adept at evoking the characters and lifestyle
of the more affluent members of society in Fin de Siecle Germany,
and he portrayed this world with obvious affection and occasionally the lightest of mockery.
The expressive jubilant style of his work and the easily accessible, never shocking
content of his depictions made Řezníček one of the most popular illustrators of the period,
and he featured with parricular regularity in Simplicissimus for around 14 years.
Throughout what would turn out to be only a brief career he published several themed albums which
collected various of his illustrations. All of these sold in large numbers.
Řezníček also illustrated novels and stories and some of his images
were also reprinted as postcards in the first decade of the 20th century
Oddly, poster design appears to have held little interest for him and this
is the only example I found, which was created sometime around 1900.
As the 20th century got underway Řezníček was among the first to dispense with traditional
lithography, and he began creating his work as paintings, which were reproduced by the
increasingly popular full colour process. The images remained every bit as lively and
expressive as his earlier work and he was now also able to sell the originals as art to collectors.
I've been unable to uncover the circumstances of his death but it's recorded that he died
at the age of only 41 in 1909, and his career in illustration had lasted for just 2 decades.
René Giffey was born in Paris in 1884 and he became one of the most prolific French
illustrators of the first half of the twentieth century , with a career spanning 50 years
He Trained at both the National School of Decorative Arts
and at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris.
The early years of his career are poorly documented, but it is known he was creating
work for a couple of popular children's magazines, and these examples from Saint
Nicolas magazine indicate an already assured quality of draughtsmanship and figure work.
Not long after his illustrations also began to appear in books including Les
Sondeurs d'Abime by Maurice Champagne in 1911. And the success of this partnership
led to several others, including 1915's La Vallée Mysterieuse.
But by this point Giffey had already joined the army.
He fought up to 1917 when he was poisoned by a gas attack and was invalided out.
Following the end of the war he quickly re-established himself and
was working on a regular basis on books, magazines and children's adventure comics.
And in the post war years he developed a reputation for his more adult illustrations
for several of the sexually liberated magazines bing published at this time.
He was a regular contributor to La Vie Parisienne,
and the lesser known Parisiana, and most frequently in Paris Plaisirs.
Wildly differing dates are stated for the publication of Giffey's visualisation of Don
Quixote, but 1923 seems to be the most reliable on offer. But whenever it was created it was
surely one of his greatest achievements as an interpretation of classic literature,
even if the text was re-written for children. The series of pen and watercolour images he
created were particularly successful in bringing to life this adventure story.
In addition to his ongoing light erotic magazine work
during the mid 1930s Giffey also illustrated some
pornographic books of varying degrees of frankness, even though he doesn't seem to
have done this for long.
Around the same time he took over the illustration
of the stories of Luce et Colas from Pierre Lissac, and he also created an
adaptation of Theophile Gautier's novel Capitain Fracasse, published in 1933.
As with all his output this comic book demonstrated Giffey's absolute
mastery of anatomy using precise but never mechanical line work.
He was too old to have been expected to fight during the Second World War
and when it ended he left Paris for the town of Arachon, from where he he seems
to have abandoned all other work in favour of adventure comics and retelling of classics.
Between 1946 and 1949 he created an extended comic strip re-telling of Hugo's les Miserables,
and this project alone was a significant volume of narrative graphic work.
Rene Giffey died from a heart attack in 1965 when he was 81 years old,
and in France at least he has served as a monumental inspiration to those who
followed in the same tradition even up to the present day.
Cyrus Leroy Baldridge was born in Alton, New York in 1889. When he was still a young boy his mother
left his father and Cyrus went with her while she earned a living selling kitchen equipment
from town to town.
At the age of only 10 Cyrus was accepted as the youngest
ever student at Frank Holme's Chicago School of Illustration.
But despite his obvious artistic abilities Baldridge went on to study at an unnamed
subject at the University of Chicago in 1907, and paid for his studies by selling illustrations.
Following graduation he started looking for commissions while working in various jobs,
including time as a cowhand in Texas. When the Great war broke out in Europe
Baldridge was employed as a newspaper war correspondent and illustrator.
And in 1917, when America joined the allies he also became a contributor
to the army's Stars and Stripes newspaper. His war drawings featured in magazines, and when
the conflict was over he published many of them in book form as I was There with the Yanks in France.
Not much later he met and married the writer Caroline Singer and having set up home in Harmon,
New York they travelled extensively, mainly to Africa and the East throughout the decade.
Singer wrote about these trips, Baldridge provided the illustrations, and they published
a series of books, but unfortunately examples of these are frustratingly thin on the ground.
The only solid example I've been able to track down is 1935's Boomba Lives in Africa,
which seems to have been the last of their collaborations.
Two years later Baldridge created a series of impressive and engrossing colour illustrations
for a re-issue of the tale of Hajji Baba of Isfahan, written by James Morier.
At this time he was using a combination of ink, watercolour and coloured pencil or crayon,
which gave his images considerable decorative appeal and solidity.
His illustrations for Eric Knight's book Lassie Come Home in 1940 used it again,
but a year later his colour work for Arthur Waley's Translations from the Chinese relied
entirely on line and wash for a suitably oriental effect. And for this book Baldridge
also created a large number of brush drawn spot monochromes which were particularly convincing.
In 1942 his colour images for The Parables of the
New Testament were published and once more his combination of line and tonal
colour proved extremely effective in holding the reader's attention.
In 1945 he had two very different books published,
Rickshaw Boy, written by Lau Shaw featured more of his brush and ink monochromes, and Hans Brinker
and the Silver Skates contained the tonal colour technique he had also built his reputation on.
He used it again with great success for the The Adventures of Marco Polo in 1948,
and in the same year he was one of a trio of illustrators commissioned to illustrate
a visually compelling edition of The Children's Story Bible.
It was 3 years until his next published work,
a series of brush monochromes for the story Chariot in the Sky, written by Arna Bontemps,
and following this he and Singer retired to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In 1959 he made a brief return to illustration with From Long Ago and Many Lands, but the
rest of his retirement was spent sketching and painting landscapes around Northern New Mexico.
in 1963 Caroline Singer died following a series of strokes,
and when his own physical decline later deteriorated to the point
where he'd had enough Cyrus Baldridge shot himself in 1977 at the age of 88.
And that rather sad ending wraps up this instalment and I hope as
ever we'll meet up again next time around.